Re: Full-screen editor in /bin
On Tuesday 30 July 2002 06:26 pm, Patrick Wiseman wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, Paul Johnson wrote:
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> > On Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 08:51:19PM -0400, Patrick Wiseman wrote:
> > > :) OK, I've fired up emacs on a couple of occasions and found it
> > >
> > > completely unintuitive and so returned to nano (before that pico) for
> > > simple text editing (and coding).
> >
> > Yes, but you can tell emacs to explain itself. Start emacs, hit
> > Ctrl-h then hit t and it'll give you a nice newbie tutorial.
>
> I promise not to give a running commentary on my experience with emacs,
> but I just entered 'emacs' in a terminal (naively expecting it to open in
> my terminal, because I thought _xemacs_ was a whole different
> application) and it opened a window _taller_ than my 800x600 display. Not
> a good start! Can I run it _in_ a terminal, the way I run nano? And it
> _still_ strikes me as unintuitive - I just want to _edit_ for gods' sake
> and it opens with all this information about buffers and stuff in
> _exactly_ the place where I expect to be entering my text. So, I start
> entering text, and it tells me "This buffer is for notes you don't want to
> save, and for Lisp evaluation." Huh? This is _not_ intuitive. (And when
> I do what it tells me - C-x C-f - it leaves me in that buffer.)
>
every couple of years, on the recommendation of one person or another, i try
to overcome my resistance to emacs. the last time was about six months ago.
while i respect all those who've made it do whatever they need it to do, it
felt way too much like joining a cult to be any actual pleasure. for
*nix-based editors, nothing works for me like vi, particularly because of the
fact that a whole lot of vi is invoked in exactly the same way as a whole
bunch of everything else in *nix. it's minimal, the learning time is almost
nothing, and the thing has all the power (and more) that i ever need. about
the only reason i would give it up is if the next best thing could wake me
with breakfast at the ready. let me know if that happens. i wish that i could
make myself think better of it, particularly given that it's rms's pet
project, but i have to concede that i can't.
ben
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