Dave's difficulties with manual activities
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From: Dave Searles on 7 Sep 2009 23:32 Ravi wrote: > Dave Searles <searles(a)hoombah.nurt.bt.uk> writes: >> Alan Mackenzie wrote: >>> Please also understand that a lot of Emacs's features that you slag off >>> are precisely what Emacs users find useful >> What "features that I slag off"? The only things I've "slagged" are *missing* features and standards >> non-conformance. The only "feature" of emacs that I object to IS standards non-conformance; any REAL feature of emacs >> can be left alone in most cases, and at worst needs to be moved to a different key combination, to achieve standards >> conformance. > > [personal attack deleted] I will take that as your conceding that you don't have a logical argument against what I've said. Thank you.
From: Lars Rune Nøstdal on 8 Sep 2009 02:22 All that effort, and you're still wrong. What a waste.
From: Tim Bradshaw on 8 Sep 2009 03:04 On 2009-09-08 03:04:44 +0100, Dave Searles <searles(a)hoombah.nurt.bt.uk> said: > have written a detailed rebuttal of Alan's post as a direct followup > to that post; suffice it to say here that a) it is laced with technical > jargon which, moreover, is not the technical jargon the ENTIRE REST of > the editor industry uses, and b) its organization is like a printed > manual and is not amenable to computer-assisted browsing, unlike the > help files of truly modern applications when viewed in truly modern > help browsers. It's OK, no one is forcing you to use Emacs!
From: David Kastrup on 8 Sep 2009 03:13 Dave Searles <searles(a)hoombah.nurt.bt.uk> writes: > Alan Mackenzie wrote: >> Hi, Dave, >> >> I think it's clear by now that Emacs isn't your sort of program, and you >> should stop telling everybody what you find difficult about it. We >> believe you, honest! > > Then why do you continue to argue against what I say? If you are > arguing against a position that you believe, then your behavior is > most illogical. Oh, one can readily believe that you don't like Emacs. That's a statement of taste and your volition. But the heaps of misinformation that you spread in order to keep even smart people from looking at it, warrants correction. -- David Kastrup
From: Alan Mackenzie on 8 Sep 2009 05:44
In comp.lang.lisp Dave Searles <searles(a)hoombah.nurt.bt.uk> wrote: > Alan Mackenzie wrote: >> Hi, Dave, >> I think it's clear by now that Emacs isn't your sort of program, and you >> should stop telling everybody what you find difficult about it. We >> believe you, honest! > Then why do you continue to argue against what I say? If you are arguing > against a position that you believe, then your behavior is most illogical. What you say is, in its own terms, true, but we don't accept these terms. We disagree with your basic assumptions. We disagree that "standard" is always better than "intrinsically good". We disagree that "modern" is always "good". You don't seem keen to debate, or even to acknowledge, these matters. >> Please also understand that a lot of Emacs's features that you slag off >> are precisely what Emacs users find useful > What "features that I slag off"? Um. There's actually a limit on the size of articles my ISP allows me to post, so I'll leave this one. ;-) > The only things I've "slagged" are *missing* features and standards > non-conformance. That's the great thing about standards, there're so many to chose from. > The only "feature" of emacs that I object to IS standards > non-conformance; any REAL feature of emacs can be left alone in most > cases, and at worst needs to be moved to a different key combination, > to achieve standards conformance. I think you're wrong here. The key sequences of Emacs, which you want to change, are essential to Emacs. The standard you like is designed to be easy to learn, whereas Emacs is designed to be efficient to use. I think it would be a good exercise to write down a list of things you commonly want to do whilst editing (delete word at cursor, go to start of file (then return whence you came), go to start/end of function, refill a block comment, reindent a block of code, move to first non-blank character on line, that sort of thing), and compare the length of the key sequences for Emacs with your favourite standard comforming editor. The Emacs ones will be shorter and more efficient. >> However, [personal attacks deleted, including accusing me of >> misleading people] It wasn't an accusation. It was merely an outpointing, in the interests of stemming the flow of falsehoods, without intending to impute malice thereto. > I will take that as your conceding that you don't have a logical > argument against what I've said. I do. That argument is that your basic assumptions are not necessarily valid. >>> With MS Word, the basic editing keystrokes like cut, copy, paste, and so >>> forth are known without consulting the MS Word manual, and furthermore, >>> the MS Word manual is a hypertext with clickable hyperlinks and an >>> easy-to-find-and-use table of contents, index, and search feature. >> Those commands need to be learnt from a manual (or another person) the >> first time they're used, whether you mean the one in MS Word or the ones >> in Emacs. > That is entirely missing the point: the basic text-editing commands are > Windows-wide and translate fairly readily to the Mac as well (command > replaces control as the meta-key for some of them and that's about it). Those on the Mac are different, and need to be relearnt. Same with Emacs. > A user only needs to learn them ONCE, and typically does in school, and > then they can use them in EVERY APPLICATION. Yes, you're right. Nobody's arguing with that. What people are saying is that that's not really such a big deal as you're trying to make out. > Well, every application except emacs and other similarly-ill-behaved > non-native ports, that is. > On the other hand, emacs's idiosyncratic versions of these commands must > be learned just for emacs's own sake. Yes, you're right. Nobody's arguing with that either. What they and I am saying is it's well worth learning them. > That knowledge is NOT learned early in life, is NOT useful beyond a > single application, and is NOT otherwise useful. Yes, you're right, for some value of "early". So what? > Worse, a user of emacs will have to remember to interact with emacs > differently than how they interact with *every other application*. > Because emacs is the only one that refuses to conform. Yes, you're right, except for the word "refuse", and the word "only", since nobody with any authority has ever demanded such a change, and there are other applications which don't conform to your standard. > Worse still, it apparently goes beyond binding the "wrong" keys to > various functions, to oddball semantics and non-standard behaviors of a > subtler sort, involving mouse and selection and focus handling. Well, you're probably right again. But Emacs's aim is to have the most useful semantics, not to conform to everything else. > When one application does everything differently from all the others, > while all those others are fairly consistent among one another, the one > application can quite fairly be charged with "not getting along well > with others" I think. So what? > By this time, the Windows interface is a very well established standard, > so any application still actively maintained that continues to severely > deviate from typical computer users' expectations must be doing so > deliberately; Emacs certainly does so deliberately. It provides a refuge to those who strongly dislike that standard. I am one of these people. > it is not so much broken as a maverick intentionally defying the user No, it offers the user an optimal, efficient interface. The user is at all times free to go and use a lesser program, such as one you favour. > and purposely not going along with the crowd. Yes. People who unthinkingly follow the crowd are often symbolised as sheep, for good reason. > As a result it [Emacs] will not see much adoption. It has seen a great deal of adoption, and is widely used. > It will be criticized for doing things in oddball ways and refusing to > adapt to the modern era. Well, yes. There will always be people like you and Xah (the OP) criticising Emacs on these grounds. There's freedom of speech, and all that, and every now and then somebody like you, just out of sheer randomness, is going to suggest something useful to Emacs, and that will get implemented. You haven't done so yet, though. > Flaming me won't make any difference to those facts. No, and it also won't make any difference to how pertinent, or otherwise, those facts are. > It won't magically make what I've said stop being true and miraculously > trigger a renaissance of emacs-use with a sudden massive spike in > adoption. It can't do this anymore than the RIAA's various lawsuits and > lobbying will put the digital genie back in the bottle or newspapers > all colluding to create a paywall will result in everyone paying for > news again. You know, there are some people who might find your comparison of Emacs with the RIAA's lawsuits somewhat offensive. > You can't turn back the clock. I can. I do it once a year in the springtime. > The world has moved on, and the vast majority of the people have spoken. > The emacs style of interface is yesterday's news. Get over it, already. I think you're wrong here. The vast majority "of the people" had no say in the matter one way or the other. They simply had that style of interface thrust on them whether they liked it or not. My sister, who uses the standard Microsoft office stuff in an office, was visibly impressed when I showed her Emacs for the first time. She said "I wish we could have that instead of the rubbish we have to use", or something like that. >>> With emacs, the basic editing keystrokes like cut, copy, paste, and so >>> forth are NOT known without consulting the emacs manual, and the emacs >>> manual is just a buffer that comes up full of a very long piece of text >>> with no hyperlinked index or contents and no (obvious that I could find) >>> search capability. >> You're wrong here. > No, I am not. Oh yes you are. Your use of the word "just" is wrong. >> The Emacs manual is a buffer, yes, but it's divided up into chapters, >> sections, pages, call them what you will. > It's a text file. Yes. It is actually readable as a plain text file, but nobody ever reads it that way except, it seems, you. > I didn't claim it was entirely un-organized; it is > organized something like a paper book. And that is the problem. Such an > organization is unsuited to digital viewing, browsing, and manipulation. > You can't just click some cross-reference to follow it; and even in a > paper book, if it said "see xyz on page 134" you could flip to page 134 > and you'd have a single page to search for what you were interested in. > Here we have the worst of both worlds: no hypertext links and no page > numbers to flip to either. You're just plain wrong here, probably because you've not discovered how to read manuals on Emacs. Please take this short tutorial: (i) Start Emacs (ii) Type C-h i (that's "control h" followed by "i"). This should bring up a page called "The Info Directory". (iii) Move the cursor down to the line starting "* Emacs" and type <CR>. Alternatively, click the mouse over that "Emacs". (iv) Navigate through the tree of pages using the hyperlinks. > There's a reason why the entire rest of the software industry has > migrated to hyperlinked, searchable help with tables of contents that > contain hyperlinks and with hyperlinked indices. Yes. People noticed how well it worked in Emacs, and adopted the ideas in other programs. Sadly those copies lack many of the useful features of the Emacs original. > It baffles me why so much of emacs remains stuck in the past, refusing > to move beyond what was the state of the art circa 1985. It does indeed baffle you, and several people, including me, have attempted to supplant that bafflement with understanding. Not with much success, so far. However, I think it's reasonable of us to ask you to respect Emacs's features, and the people who use it, even though you don't understand Emacs itself. > Especially when in a few superficial ways it HAS moved beyond that, yet > in many crucially important ways it simply will not budge. Emacs isn't subject to the dictates of fashion and passing fads. Well, not much. I think we understand what you mean by "crucially important", yet disagree on the importance and the cruciality. > [snip much that appears to be nonsense] > If I had never used emacs you might have been able to fool me. But I > have used it and I have struggled with its online help. You have never used Emacs. You may have started it a few times and struggled with it, but that hardly counts as using it. You've gone into Emacs with the attitude that you'll be able to use it efficiently with a minimum of learning time. That just isn't the case. > It does not have hyperlinks, nor a proper table of contents. For the third time, you're simply wrong. What I tell you three times is true. See above for how to access the online help properly. > As stated above, it is organized like a printed manual (and even has > instructions near the start on how to print it), but lacks even a > printed book's primitive method of cross-referencing: page numbers. Do you honestly believe that hackers of the calibre who created Emacs would put up with that for 25 years? The instructions for printing are for those people who want it printed. If you follow them, you'll get a printed book (modulo binding), complete with page numbers, and all the cross references will contain pertinent page numbers. The FSF does this and sells those manuals in book form. Just as a matter of interest, is there a nice easy way to print out your favourite variety of help files in book form? >>> Making matters worse, even were one to stumble upon the search feature >>> (assuming it has one, as seems likely) the manual is written in >>> emacsese rather than English. >> It's written in English, stylish, well written, and well organised. > It's written in English heavily laced with an emacs-specific technical > jargon, rather than in plain English. It's written in plain easily understandable English, and naturally uses Emacs jargon, just as a book about philosopy would use philosophical jargon. > As for how it's organized, it is that this organization is not > accessible to automation that bothers me. Simply having a text file > that reads like a printed book is nowhere near the present-day state > of the art in online help systems and you know it. For the fourth time "it" is organised in a highly cross referenced hierarchical structure, specifically designed for easy online use. This continually repeated falsehood of yours appears to be crossing the line between "being mistaken" and "deliberately misleading". Please start Emacs, type C-h i (as directed above), play around with it, and forever refrain from repeating this falsehood. An admission that you have been mistaken might help your standing on these newsgroups. >>> It's chock full of "buffer", "kill", "yank", and so forth. >> A user who has difficulty grasping these simple, yet precise, terms > Who said anything about difficulty? My complaint is with inconsistency: You have complained of alleged difficulty. The usage is entirely consistent within the manual. > 1. These terms are not intuitive; why should a technical jargon have to > be mastered to use a *text editor*?? We're not talking about a > nuclear reactor or 3DSMAX here, I really don't want to know about your intimate life, thank you. > we're talking about a glorified Notepad. You're mistaken here, too, unless you think of Michael Schumacher's racing car as a glorified children's pedal car. You wouldn't learn Emacs if writing to Grandma was your main task. You wouldn't learn MS Word for this either, come to think of it. You also wouldn't want to hack lisp in Notepad (remember, you're posting on a lisp newsgroup). > 2. These terms are inconsistent with the industry-standard ones used > everywhere else. So users will have to learn TWO sets of terms to > use emacs and other applications, versus one to use any combination > not including emacs. Big deal. Think how many different words you've learnt which mean to disagree: there's disagree, argue, quarrel, bicker, have a difference of opinion, flame, ...... > 3. Because of item number 2, searching (or just visually skimming) the > help file for the term the user is likely to think of for something > is likely to draw a blank because the emacs manual refers to it > using its own idiosyncratic terminology instead of the terminology > computer users are used to. One of the earliest sections in the Emacs manual is a glossary. You'll find the Emacs terms and their "standard" equivalents there. Search for "paste", for example, and you'll find this entry: Cut and Paste See `killing' and `yanking.' > Perhaps you should read Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox columns. He focuses on > web interfaces but some of the guidelines he comes up with are more > broadly applicable. One of those is: I find web interfaces in general horrible to use. I think they've some way to go before approaching the quality of desktop applications. > If your site (application) is different from all the others that do the > same job in ways that make it require extra effort or special training > to use, users will go elsewhere. Yes. > Another one is: > Using clever neologisms and idiosyncratic terminology will backfire. Using stupid neologisms is worse. Neologisms are necessary when there aren't handy existing words which could mean what they need to mean. Being honest, "kill" isn't a good term for "remove a piece of text from a buffer, storing it somewhere for possible future use", but then "cut" isn't any better. "Kill" probably existed first, and "cut" was an unneeded "clever neologism", but who cares? > These are important usability considerations and you have repeatedly > failed to consider them or to provide anything approaching a reasoned > rebuttal to these arguments. No, they have been considered in depth, many times, by the Emacs development team, which has never been convinved by the arguments you restate here with great prolixity. > I will take that as your conceding that you don't have a logical > argument against what I've said. What you say is mostly right in its own terms, but not of much relevance to Emacs. >>> A user searching for "copy" will find little of interest, >> >> If you type "i copy" you go directly to a page entitled "Using the >> clipboard". > > This statement of yours has multiple problems: > 1. As I've already explained, the emacs help text uses "kill" and "yank" > and "kill ring" in place of "cut" and "paste" and "clipboard"; > everyone here surely knows this. Furthermore I can't recall it saying > anything about "copy". > 2. I've never heard of this "i copy" thing, and even if that actually > somehow works it will land you on a page that discusses the "kill > ring", and furthermore there's no way for a naive user to even > discover that command anyway (what, it's in the help and "i help" > will tell them all about it? Er, just *think* about that for a > minute...) > 3. And if "i copy" DOES work, then there's an even more serious problem > which is that you can't easily edit text containing the letter "i". > Presumably there's some way to escape and type a literal "i" but > who is ever going to guess that? No text editor should respond > to the ordinary typable symbols (when the focus is on the main > text-editing area of its user interface) in any way other than by > inserting the typed symbol at the insertion point in that text file > and moving the insertion point to the right one character (so it's > now immediately after the freshly-inserted symbol). Violation of > that rule is one of vi's principal faults, and now it transpires > that it is also one of emacs's. > How many users get tripped up when they go to write a letter to Grandma > and start typing, only when they hit "i" the help suddenly opens and > grabs focus and interprets the next several keystrokes as some sort of > search query? Look. If you start Emacs and expect just to use it, you'll be disappointed. You need to put in some considerable learning time. If you don't want to invest this time, use a different program. That paragraph shows that you don't understand the central Emacs concept of "mode". You would type your letter to Grandma in "text mode", and you would read the documentation in "Info mode". The letter and the manual would each be in its own buffer, and you switch the focus between these buffers either by clicking the mouse or by typing an appropriate key sequence (e.g. C-x o). Many key sequences do different things in different modes. This is the whole point of modes - there's not much point in having a "look up in the index" command in text mode. >>> The refusal to use what has become standard text-editing and >>> user-interface terminology in the emacs manual will cripple the >>> usefulness of any search feature and make any index or TOC >>> entries that ever did appear one day much harder to interpret; a >>> hypothetical TOC entry for "The Kill Ring" has no obvious relevance to a >>> user looking in the manual for the key bindings for basic clipboard >>> operations, yet I think that is precisely where that documentation would >>> be found. >> Have you tried it? The page "Kill Ring" (which indeed has a TOC entry) > I don't count it unless there's an easy way to jump from the "TOC entry" > to the chapter or section at issue. For the fifth time, there is. You click the mouse on the entry in the table of contents page, which is called "Top". > In a Windows help file, displayed in the Windows help browser, there > is. Emacs just displays the help as a text file, or even just a part of > the help, and a read-only one at that; all you can do, therefore, is > read it. Yes. Most of the time you don't want to edit documentation. If you do, you can make it read/write by typing C-x C-q. [ Rest of the stuff deleted, due to repetitiveness ] >> does indeed document some key bindings used for basic "clipboard" >> operations. > While failing to call them by the industry-standard names. (And if it > does retain a history of past clipboard entries, it can't possibly be > doing so using the system-native clipboard on Windows or, I expect, the > Mac. So there's another problem: if you cut text in emacs and then try > to paste it in Thunderbird or whatever, you'll get nothing or the wrong > text out of the paste. This may be true. I personally don't use Emacs in a GUI, so I wouldn't know. If what you say is true, then it's a bug. Emacs does have bugs, though probably not as many as the "standard" says it should. ;-) > The headaches for the emacs user just multiply and multiply. As a matter of interest, there are two calculator programs contained in Emacs to allow people who can't multiply in their heads to multiply without headaches. > It is increasingly clear that emacs was designed to be used in > isolation, by someone completely unconcerned by the fact that in > the real world people use a lot more applications than just one text > editor on their computers. There's some truth in this. It was primarily written as a programmers' editor, being optimised for the things that programmers do. It does interface cleanly with several external programs, such as compilers, version control systems, and the shell. >> By the way, how come you're familiar with the Emacs jargon "ring"? ;-) > Because I have used emacs. Yes, you have in fact run across something > you thought didn't exist (or, perhaps, did not want to admit existed): > someone who HAS used emacs that nonetheless is critical of it. Oh, lots of people are critical of Emacs. Much of that criticism is positive and helpful, and helps the improvement of Emacs. Your criticism doesn't fall into this category, sadly. Your expectations of Emacs were clearly unrealistic. To sum up, you don't want to use Emacs, and I hope nobody's forcing you to, so just don't do it. You also don't understand Emacs, but it would be nice if you had a bit more respect for those who do, and for the program itself. No hard feelings, but Emacs isn't for you. > Thank you. -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). |