Re: bigots - was Emacs - was Mail/news software
On Sun, Apr 30, 2000 at 02:13:19PM +0100, Phillip Deackes wrote:
Let me begin by saying I don't plan to prolong this thread after saying my
piece. Insert smilie here.
I don't like the reaction from most sides about this. It bodes ill for
Linux -- for free software users in general.
Let's start at the beginning:
> I am very sorry if I offend, but I find emacs/xemacs about the most
> off-putting thing in Linux. Show a newbie that and you will see the dust
> as he turns and runs back to the Windows camp.
Personally, I agree. The issue brought up was not one of "is Emacs powerful" or "is
emacs 'intuitive'" but "is emacs useful to a newbie?
Once again, personally, I can't stand the thing, and I'm definitely not a
newbie. It's an EDITOR, not an OS... the last thing I want is a M$-Word for
editing my sources.list. I love joe since it's powerful, has many faces, is
fast and lean, and if I forget a keystroke I can ^KH to find it. Oh yeah,
you can type "jmacs" if you have the time to learn the commands. I also
break out in boils when vi is on the hard drive.
It reminds me of ~three years ago the 313373 unix bigots said "Who needs KDE, I
use sed to modify my olvwm config file." Now they say they run GNOME... I
can't help but think MAYBE they're using their skills a bit more
productively; instead of writing impossible shell commands to make a
titlebar on an xterm, they pop open a gterminal and get coding.
OK, maybe xemacs.
The point is; some of us don't want to load a browser and a news client and
a "doctor" game to write an e-mail message. We'd rather work the *nix "toolbox"
way. Just realize that and don't condemn us for that, and on the larger
scale, realize that something like pico is *good for Linux*... Perl wizards
may not want to learn the editor language and the programming language at
the same time! We may end up with some darn useful Perl scripts.
An OS to make you think? Who says that's its job? It's incendiary comments
on a mailing list that make you think! When you are gonna be late for work
and want to bring your mail on a floppy, you can't think, you want
convenience. Allow you to think about what you need to think about. Now
THAT's more of an OS job...
Thanks for the pedestal. Back to lurk mode.
--
Jonathan Markevich <jmarkevich@mad.scientist.com>
http://members.xoom.com/JMarkevich
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