the Modernization of Emacs
in [Lisp]
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From: Tim X on 18 Apr 2006 04:10 Fredrik Bulow <kaliumfredrik(a)gmail.com> writes: > I think this discussion has gone a bit out of control. Xah is > obviously a newbie trying to learn Emacs and while learning he has > encountered a few thing that he thought were weird. Since he is a > newbie he can't do much about these things himself and therefor he > writes down a list with all the "problems" and submits the list to an > emacs forum where it will be brought to the attention of people who > can actually do something about these problems. Complaining that he > doesn't really contribute anything is silly since he can't. I think he > did the right thing and that should be encouraged, not punished. > > Emacs is a niche editor for those who write lots of stuff and are > willing to put in the (arguably large) learning effort required > because they know it will pay back in the long run. Therefor making it > newbie friendly might not be the most important thing. However, I have > a feeling that there are lots of emacs conservatives who simply are > against all changes. This point of view makes sense when you have a > massive emacs knowledge and fear that if emacs changes you will be > confused by new key bindings, concept names etc. The viewpoints of > these people is motivated by a "fear of loss" and is counter > productive. I think it's great that every now and then a complete > newbie speaks up and say "these things confuse me" so that more > experienced users can be reminded of the newbie perspective when > writing mode manuals or implementing new features. > You don't seem to be familiar with Xah's fairly regular posts. I'd suggest you go and look at his website and then consider if you still agree with what you have written. I also don't think most of the experienced users who are against changing the defaults are doing so because they are afraid of change or loss - emacs is wonderful because you can make changes relatively easily and experienced users won't have any problems changing the defaults back again. Experienced users are more likely gainst the change because new users won't get to experience how efficient the current setup can be. they will stick with the defaults and never change. Leaving the current defaults means they will get to try it out and after giving it a genuine go, will be in a position to make a real assessment - if they decide they don't like it, they will have the knowledge to change it by then and can easily do so, but just maybe like many other users in the past, they will get use to the defaults and then begin to see the benefits of an alternative approach. Tim -- tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
From: Fredrik Bulow on 18 Apr 2006 11:29 Tim X <timx(a)nospam.dev.null> writes: > Fredrik Bulow <kaliumfredrik(a)gmail.com> writes: > > You don't seem to be familiar with Xah's fairly regular posts. I'd > suggest you go and look at his website and then consider if you still > agree with what you have written. No, I figured out how to read news about one week ago. :-) > I also don't think most of the experienced users who are against > changing the defaults are doing so because they are afraid of change > or loss - emacs is wonderful because you can make changes relatively > easily and experienced users won't have any problems changing the > defaults back again. Experienced users are more likely gainst the > change because new users won't get to experience how efficient the > current setup can be. they will stick with the defaults and never > change. Leaving the current defaults means they will get to try it out > and after giving it a genuine go, will be in a position to make a real > assessment - if they decide they don't like it, they will have the > knowledge to change it by then and can easily do so, but just maybe > like many other users in the past, they will get use to the defaults > and then begin to see the benefits of an alternative approach. Yeah, the cool thing with emacs is that you can turn it into whatever you want. And yes, the defaults makes good sense actually. I once installed some horrible package with alternative emacs configurations (can't remember what it was called) and that made me appreciate the defaults. How user interfaces should and shouldn't work is a very interesting question. Personally I think that something went terrible wrong with mainstream computing when GUIs were introduced. Self-explaining programs started breeding the attitude that "what you can do does not depend on your knowledge but on what software you have". If you want to make web pages you buy web page drawing program and if some feature is missing in that program then you wait until someone else makes a button for that thing. All tasks are split into the two categories "trivial" and "impossible". It's also up to someone else to determine what should be transfered to the "trivial" category. Users are only suppose to click ok without reading to many messages and if an error occurs they tend to say "it didn't work because I got an error message" rather than actually reading the error message. A behavior that makes sense since reading through an error message and fixing something yourself seems non-trivial and is therefor probably impossible. Emacs is a completely different type of user interface. When working with emacs you determine which task should be trivial and which ones shouldn't and what determines what is possible for you to make trivial depends only on your knowledge. Emacs focuses on providing functionality rather than functions (what a hell does that mean? I mean, not providing an actual function button but rather providing functions that can be used to make the thing you need sort of... oh well..). I personally love this attitude and that's why I am learning emacs. However, I believe that emacs is diverging more and more from mainstream computing as Emacs is further and further refined and the stupidification (is that a real word?) of mainstream computing progresses. Actually I think this is the main reason why people go berserk when reading the writings of Xah. They believe that "modernization towards the newbie" sounds like a slogan for someone who wants emacs to have a neat GUI where all the tasks that can be done can be done trivially. To be honest, the reason I started backing up Xah in the first place was because I thought he was a newbie who tried to provide constructive critique.
From: Tim Bradshaw on 18 Apr 2006 16:20 Rob Warnock wrote: > > p.s. Hmmm... What does TECO have that Vi doesn't? > Answer: Tests, branching, and looping in its macros. > *Real* answer: Let's port VTECO to curses! That's > the ticket! A long time ago someone posted a proof (well, an informal one I guess) that vi was turing-equivalent (and not vim or something, the original vi). So it really does have all these things, if a bit obscurely. So I revise my plan. I am now implementing teco in vi, possibly via intermidiate PDP-10 and applescript emulation layers. --tim
From: Tim Bradshaw on 18 Apr 2006 16:24 Tim Bradshaw wrote: > ... via > intermidiate PDP-10 and applescript emulation layers. and I guess a spelling checker written in SNOBOL
From: Galen Boyer on 24 Apr 2006 22:35
On 16 Apr 2006, lord(a)emf.net wrote: > What is *not* well thought out is the particular choices of > keybindings. It's not *poorly* thought out -- it's just nothing > special. The fact that I can hit any prefix key and then C-h is pretty damn well thought out! -- Galen Boyer |