Comments on: The One True Editor https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/ Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:14:17 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.6 By: Daniel Colascione https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532006 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:14:17 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532006 You’d probably be happier with Emacs 23 — which is pretty much stable at this point. It has the equivalent to cua and longlines-mode built into the core, so these features are much more robust.

]]> By: Paul https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532005 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:43:33 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532005 Hmmm… my mistake: indeed longlines, which I see is still here in 23 as well as the new thing, doesn’t break words. In general I find that if some expected basic function/behaviour isn’t present in Emacs, usually either its just not the default – perhaps because it’s not considered ‘proper emacs style’ – and needs configuring, or it’s not been included but it can be found on emacswiki or somewhere.

I don’t know about cua mode but maybe something here will help: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CopyAndPaste

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532004 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:58:14 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532004 aha…

(setq default-major-mode ‘text-mode)
(add-hook ‘text-mode-hook ‘text-mode-hook-identify)
(add-hook ‘text-mode-hook ‘longlines-mode)
(add-hook ‘text-mode-hook ‘text-mode-hook-identify)
(add-hook ‘text-mode-hook ‘cua-mode)

of course, cua mode is still kinda funky. A ctrl-c does not copy stuff onto the system clipboard, but only to some special emacs clipboard.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532003 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:29:53 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532003 Aha! Actually, something else is going on. longlines-mode is what I want, and it works. The problem is, how to get it to turn on automatically when emacs opens a text file. I hooked it to text file mode, but it still does not turn on automatically. My problem here is that I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to lisp. Or elisp to be exact.

Ideally, text mode with longlines and cua turned on would work for me.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532002 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:11:51 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532002 Interesting. My version of snapshot (a week old) does not seem to have that, but I’m probably invoking it wrong. I pobably didn’t install everything.

It is astonishing that after 22 version of this software, which dates way back in time, it is only now that a very basic function that has bee present in all other text editors for a decade is just being thought up. This truly is a religious experience!

]]> By: Paul https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532001 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:50:39 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532001 Yeah – not good – but longlines mode has been superseded by Visual-Line mode in GNU Emacs 23 which doesn’t break up the words. I expect you weren’t the only one to complain 🙂 It’s not released officially yet but it’s usually very stable this near to release and your distro probably has a snapshot package for it.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532000 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:34:06 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-532000 So, auto-fill ruins the text (by ruins I mean inserts hard returns that I did not put there, or soft returns that won’t go away when the text is copied and pasted) and Longlines mode keeps the text from being ruined (if run by itself)

However, the problem is that longlines mode does not handle the text properly, in that words are broken across lines arbitrarily. Therefore, even if the text as a stream of date in a buffer or file is not ruined, it is visually annoying.

]]> By: Paul https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-531999 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:13:38 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-531999 Hi Greg, if you had auto-fill-mode on as well as longlines-mode, I’d guess the (real) auto-fill line wrapping would trump the purely visual line wrapping of longlines-mode.

If you’re not sure what’s really there in the buffer, M-x whitespace-mode (or whitespace-newline-mode) will show you.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-531998 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:03:56 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-531998 My latest test of faith: I wrote up a long and complex blog pot using autowrap and long lines mode, and when I got done, there were no long lines . I don’t know why that happened

Are modes supposed to randomly go away when they want to? (There i go blaming the software again…)

]]> By: Paul https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-531997 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:00:39 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/03/the-one-true-editor/#comment-531997 Yeah… the Emacs font configuration and ugliness problems are gone in GNU Emacs versions â?¥ 23, thank God: http://golux.podzone.net/piccy (that’s Deja Vu Mono apart from the preview-latex images). You can change font from a proper font dialog now and do per-buffer font scaling (C-x C-±). Deja’s got good unicode coverage as you can see if you use e.g. TeX input method (I have it set as the default for C- switching).

I expect Ediff mode can do that, Marko – it certainly could be made to do it without too much effort. In fact I doubt there is anything Emacs cannot do or be made to do and it blows every other errm… â??editorâ? out of the water as far as I’m concerned. All that stuff about Unix tool philosophy and kitchen sinks is just some weirdness which some ascetic programmers and system administrators (perhaps justifiably for them) seem to believe. For normal people, having everything there in one place (including such marvels as AUCTeX and calc and org-mode and…), all capable of interacting with each other and being modifiable and extensible with Lisp, is simply invaluable.

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