Re: Full-screen editor in /bin
On Tuesday 30 July 2002 07:25 pm, Alan Shutko wrote:
> Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@mindspring.com> writes:
> > 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)
>
> It is. But they both have similar features these days... xemacs was
> forked from Emacs before Emacs had X support.
>
> > and it opened a window _taller_ than my 800x600 display. Not a good
> > start!
>
> Emacs does obey --geometry (or -g) options (ie, -g WIDTHxHEIGHT,
> where width and height are in characters). You can also set it in
> your .Xdefaults as
>
> Emacs.geometry: WIDTHxHEIGHT
>
> > Can I run it _in_ a terminal, the way I run nano?
>
> Yes, emacs -q (or unset the DISPLAY variable).
>
> > 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.
>
> That's supposed to be helpful, by the way. Hit C-h t for the
> tutorial.
>
> > you don't want to save, and for Lisp evaluation." Huh? This is
> > _not_ intuitive.
>
> Emacs does have menus. They should help.
>
> > (And when I do what it tells me - C-x C-f - it leaves me in that
> > buffer.)
>
> It should move you to the bottom of the window (in the minibuffer)
> where you can enter a filename (with tab completion).
>
> > All I want to do is open a file or a blank page and enter text. emacs
> > seems to resist my doing that.
>
> Yes, it does. It wants you to start by opening a file (the file
> doesn't have to exist, it can be new). Once you have opened a file,
> anything you enter is autosaved so that even if Emacs or the machine
> crashes, your text is safe. If you just start entering text in a
> blank buffer, it can't do that.
i'm getting mostly autosave out of this, and i'm thinking that anything if i
don't have the presence of mind to save wasn't worth keeping. even in the
event of a total blackout, who lives without a pencil and a candle. emacs is
way big, so big that it feels that much farther away than where it came from.
apparently, it still, nonetheless, serves a whole lot of people in the way
they want to be served, and i have no gripe with those who swear by it. vi
does text and renders it easily such that it can be easily manipulated by any
other app. the thread was about editors. it's hard to say what emacs is [what
is is, anybody?]. it seems to be a whole bunch of things simultaneously.
maybe that lack of concise definition figures into why, despite the fact that
there are emacs folks, there are also non-emacs folks.
ben
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