Comments on: Technology Today

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:17:35 +0000

… or a religion …

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:28:25 +0000

… It kind of resembles, that way, life itself.

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:23:22 +0000

I’m no emacs expert, but the variable “use-hard-newlines” (use “C-h v” to see it) seems to suggest that there is a mode in which newlines are paragraph breaks. Also see “longlines-mode” and “longlines-auto-wrap”. I see a remark “The soft newlines used for line wrapping will not show up when the text is yanked or saved to disk.”

I don’t think it’s possible for emacs not to be annoying. You have to choose to tolerate it, up front, and then figure out how to mitigate annoyances as they come up. People have been doing that for a long time, so there are lots of mechanisms built in to allow you to mitigate various annoyances, to the point where it’s practically all mitigations, and actual persistent annoyances are hard to point at. (Your problem seems to be one that has been addressed that way.) All the mitigations, in aggregate, somehow fail to keep it from being annoying, in aggregate.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:10:57 +0000

My problem with emacs is that even with auto-fill mode, the stupid thing maintains line breaks at the ends of the lines in the text files it creates. I don’t ever want those newlines to exist. I only want newlines that I create to exist. No other newlines are authorized. It is hard for me to believe that people have been using emacs all this time without noticing this problem.

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:50:47 +0000

Emacs viper-mode is Good because it transcends emacs-vs-vi. It is emacs, and it is vi, both at the same time. Astonishingly (at least, astonishing to me) the key assignments for emacs and vi are almost entirely disjoint. So, as I said, no compromises. Why do I want vi in emacs? More than any other single reason, for the "." command, which has no analog in emacs proper.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:07:24 +0000

Why is viper good?

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:16:27 +0000

My comment about Abiword was in relation to OpenOffice.

Of course I use emacs… but I use it in viper mode. In insert mode, it’s full-on emacs. In command mode, it’s full-on vi. No compromises.

(setq viper-mode t)
;; (setq viper-inhibit-startup-message ‘t)
;; (setq viper-expert-level ‘3)
(require ‘viper)

Or just try “M-x viper-mode”.

By: CyberLizard

CyberLizard — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:53:47 +0000

.. why use anything but Emacs???

Um, because there’s Vim and gVim and you don’t have to remember commands like ctrl-shift-alt-f3-z. Not to start a Vim/Emacs holy war or anything 😉

I liked WindowMaker as a lightweight window manager. I wasn’t a big fan of the file manager in Gnome (Nautilus, IIRC?). It was a big resource hog, but then, I was running a crappy PII laptop w/512MB RAM. Not very impressive running much of anything.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:31:01 +0000

Henry, I think Gnome has a number of applications that are top quality for system related tasks, and the file manager is very nice.

As a Window manager, Gnome may or may not be better than Xfce, but probably not. Gnome has a button bar that you can ad fancy stuff to. It probably makes no difference.

Abiword is, of course, a word processor and is not really the topic of conversation here…. but really, Abiword is so gooey … why use anything but Emacs???

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:06:18 +0000

If you care about speed and non-cruftiness, use Abiword instead.

That is all.