the Modernization of Emacs
in [Lisp]
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From: David Kastrup on 17 Apr 2006 05:54 Tim X <timx(a)nospam.dev.null> writes: > Part of the problem with Xah's rants is he only ever sees things > from his own limited experience and always comes to the conclusion > that its the software or the operating system which is wrong - there > is no evidence of any recognition that his frustrations or > difficulties could actually be due to his own narrow > experience/opinions/world view. He reminds me of one of those > programmers who always jump tot he conclusion that a bug is due to a > problem in a library they are using or the OS or due to some weird > virus - they look at everything else before recognising the problem > is with their own code. More experienced programmers know right away > that the odds are extremely high that any bug they encounter is due > to their own mistakes or misunderstanding. Anecdote: some program of mine would not work properly, miscalculating addresses (this was at a time when real men programmed in assembly). After searching my eyes blind in the source, I finally went into very fine-grained step-by-step debugging. It turned out that a particular arithmetic shift right command did not consistently manage to keep an existing sign bit set. This was a working, stable system. I exchanged the CPU (a Z80A CPU), and the problem was gone. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
From: azubijan on 17 Apr 2006 06:00 Don't compare unix to Windows. That's not fair. Don't compare emacs to notepad. That's completly mad! I'm using emacs for 2 years and I'm programming since 2 years. I'm very pleased by the status-quo! Thank you!
From: Harald Hanche-Olsen on 17 Apr 2006 07:01 + David Kastrup <dak(a)gnu.org>: | Tim X <timx(a)nospam.dev.null> writes: | |> More experienced programmers know right away |> that the odds are extremely high that any bug they encounter is due |> to their own mistakes or misunderstanding. | | Anecdote: some program of mine would not work properly, miscalculating | addresses (this was at a time when real men programmed in assembly). Don't get me started on the story of the HP LaserJet 4Si that we used back in 1994, that had a flaky rmoveto operator. It was totally consistent in the sense that any document triggering the bug always did so in the same way, but it only affected one or two percent of all documents. We would typically see a subscript displaced a couple centimeters to the right of its proper position. Took me most of a day to figure out what was going on: I essentially wrote a small noninteractive debugger in PostScript and instrumented the problem file with it. Once the problem was diagnosed, the fix was easy enough: userdict /rmoveto known {stop} if serverdict begin 0 exitserver userdict /rmoveto { currentpoint 3 2 roll add 3 1 roll add exch moveto } bind readonly put But fun as these anecdotes are, they don't invalidate Tim's point. Though a disturbingly high proportion of bugs that I have encountered were due to other programmers' mistakes rather than my own. Part of the cost of living in an open source world, it seems. (Uh-oh, let's leave the lid on that particular can of worms.) Let me hasten to add that GNU emacs has been one of the more trouble free programs in this respect. -- * Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/> - It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true. -- Bertrand Russell
From: Greg Menke on 17 Apr 2006 07:25 M Jared Finder <jared(a)hpalace.com> writes: > > It would not be difficult to cut some of the cruft in the key bindings > to find room for Control-X-prefix and mode-specific-command-prefix, > which would be stupid to eliminate. I'd suggest starting with > uncommonly used bindings like C-] (abort-recursive-edit) and C-z > (iconify-or-deiconify-frame). OTOH, I use C-j often, so I'd like to keep that, thanks. Gregm
From: O-V R:nen on 17 Apr 2006 07:58
M Jared Finder <jared(a)hpalace.com> writes: > It would not be difficult to cut some of the cruft in the key bindings > to find room for Control-X-prefix and mode-specific-command-prefix, > which would be stupid to eliminate. I'd suggest starting with > uncommonly used bindings like C-] (abort-recursive-edit) and C-z > (iconify-or-deiconify-frame). When using Emacs without a window-system (ie in a terminal/xterm/whatever), C-z doing suspend-emacs is what one would expect (and vi not suspending on C-z means that one does have to learn the magic spell (or open/find a second terminal) to kill it). (I agree that iconify-or-deiconify-frame is pretty useless and I have actually even removed this binding.) On most non-US keyboards combinations like C-], C-\, C-_ and occasionally even C-@ range from inconvenient (one has to press one or two additional modifier keys in addition to control and the character proper) to even impossible altogether (I wasn't able to produce C-] or C-\ at all with Mac Terminal and a Danish keyboard). |