Emacs is more like life, universe and everything. Where do you need “windows” and other useless graphical features when you can access IRC from Emacs and code in multiple languages? :-/
“windows are for nubs” and console for life. ;D
Also Emacs is far from bloated. Look what happened to Opera and Mozilla Firebird. Both of them came from good minimalist sollution to bloated pieces of crap.
Opera’s only 3Mb download still…
If you want real finger dexterity, go for NetHack every time 
Much more fun than programming. Although equally frustrating.
Cas 
[quote] Also Emacs is far from bloated. Look what happened to Opera and Mozilla Firebird. Both of them came from good minimalist sollution to bloated pieces of crap.
[/quote]
Opera is 3.2 MB, and FireFox is 6.2MB and you call that bloated piece of crap??? - add to that, none of them came from a minimalist solution! Must be some fun mushrooms you grow!
Really makes me wonder what browser you’re using…
No fancy IDE beats the power of my tickertape-based literal Turing machine, with a processing power of 0.00001 MIPS!
Your statement is completely irrelevant. Power is not the issue, productivity is.
True story: having used unix for several months in a commercial development job (not EMACS, thank god; we had real dev tools) and having used Solaris and linux for a year or two at university, I had to fix a 5-line config file remotely, on a machine with Emacs. It took me:
[] A few seconds to make the change
[] 30 minutes to find the command to save the buffer (note: a lot of that time spent trying to work out how to get rid of the help system, which wouldn’t let me back to my file)
[*] 15 minutes to find out how to quit Emacs (again, major problems with the help system getting in the way
No exaggeration; the times are correct to within ± 2 minutes. And I’d already spent years without an IDE just using text editors (it was a great day when I finally got hold of DOS 5.0’s “edit”) and doing things as cryptic as x86 assembly programming.
I have never encountered any other computer program in my life that made a 4.5 second problem into a 45 minute one (nb: there’s a lot that turned 5 minute problems into 3 hour ones, usually because of a forced re-install of the OS 
).
Shrug. You can guess my opinion on EMACS. Especially given I would rather be forced to use plain VI (with none of the colours, IDE tools, visual mode etc) than to use EMACS ever again.
EDIT: EMACS personifies the extremist end of the Microsoft approach to standards - Ignore them. They don’t even embrace, but instead rush straight to the extend.
The one I particularly remember was this little key called “escape”; I concluded eventually that the designers of EMACS had decide “escape” was not to be an option, that anyone who ventured in must never be allowed out.
[quote]Emacs is more like life, universe and everything. Where do you need “windows” and other useless graphical features when you can access IRC from Emacs and code in multiple languages? :-/
[/quote]
Because I can’t paint in it, because I can’t see my applets nor applications, because I have virtual desktops, because I have IM’s running… There are a gazillion reasons why I can’t work without the windows interface
[quote]“windows are for nubs” and console for life. ;D
[/quote]
Sure - so 99.999999% percent of computer users are “nubs”. I think you got it wrong…
Consoles are superior for many things, but fail miserably in most others - and thats a fact. So far, you only make me think you’re a zealot.
Of course he’s a zealot - it’s our beloved Captain back for another few rounds of “Java Sucks Because…”! ;D
Power vs productivity is a trade-off that has to be made. Personally I’m very happy with my current solution - Eclipse handles all the project-related stuff and everyday source editing, while Vim is brought out when I badly need a few regexps or macros etc. For server-side projects I add Maven to the mix to handle compilation, packaging, distribution etc. Works like a charm.
[quote]Because no fancy IDE matches its power up to this very day!
[/quote]
I prefer a reasonable balance between power and ease of use… let me illustrate with your example…
[quote]Emacs has its documentation built in, to get started you just need one keystroke: M-x
[/quote]
M-x oh that makes perfect sense - anybody would intuitively know to press that if they didn’t know where to begin. Pathetic.
[quote]and a few function names like apropos, describe-function describe-variable and describe-mode.
[/quote]
You are kidding right? I have to type “describe-function”… so I can learn what other functions to type - just so I can use my editor/ide. No thanks.
[quote]The shortcuts come naturally after a time
[/quote]
EVERYTHING comes naturally after a time. That’s no reason to start with something lame (e.g. vi). Next I suppose we should go back to using i,j,k,m to move the cursor around?
But I think that is the point… you tend to prefer things that are similar to what you are used to. If you learned Emacs or even ‘vi’ then they seem reasonable, despite being strange to those on more neutral ground.
[quote]while Vim is brought out when I badly need a few regexps or macros etc
[/quote]
Why Vim? Textpad does what you want. I avoid everything that even sounds remotely like VI unless I don’t have any other choice.
Err what was the topic again? ;D :
Where as I find Outlook/Excahnage to be the killer app for virus writers.
In a speach Scott once jokingly called it the “petrie dish of the internet.” That sums up my reaction to it. I wont LET my wife run it at home.
Actually you’re better off from stopping her from running WIndows at all at that point. Much of the problem isn’t with Outlook - its with Windows and its RPC services. There is nothing wrong with what Outlook does, its that the functionality isn’t sandbox’d in 99/9% of cases.
It appears that the first message on a new page isn’t visible until there is another one (i.e. this one). Before I write this the last visible message is by Jeff, while there is apparently a later message by gregorypierce which I can’t see. Sorry if this post is ‘off topic’ but hey this is the off topic area!
Bingo! the previous post is now visible!
[quote]Why Vim? Textpad does what you want. I avoid everything that even sounds remotely like VI unless I don’t have any other choice.
[/quote]
Why Vim? Because I’ve used it for years and am incredibly adept at doing so. I’ve not used TextPad much at all, but find it hard to believe that things like regexps are as easily accessed as with Vim - but I’ll have to check it out one day. Anyway, whether I’m in Windows or Linux I can use the same text editor, which I find helpful. But, of course, YMMV! ;D
[quote]Err what was the topic again? ;D :
[/quote]
Drifting, man. Rapidly drifting…
You’ve really got to try Textpad, Charlie. It’s a dream editor.
Cas
[quote]You’ve really got to try Textpad, Charlie. It’s a dream editor.
[/quote]
I’ve used UltraEdit for some time now - it has an awesome array of features!
That’s a very nice Win32 text editor indeed. I’ve used to use it for years, too. However some time ago I kicked it in favour of JEdit and I’ve to say it’s a lovely editor.
OK, so it runs on our favourite computer and gets faster with any new JVM.
In short: http://www.jedit.org
There must be a doctoral thesis somewhere being written about thread drift…
;D
BTW: the one thing stopping me from using JEdit is the code completion stuff. Yes, I am a lazy programmer. Yes, I like my dot-completion.
I know there was a plugin being worked on, but last time I tried it … yerk!
Hi,
To come back to linux being scrap for majority of end users thread, Eric S. Raymond has a good snapshot:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
The part I most like is This kind of fecklessness is endemic in open-source land. And it’s what’s keeping Microsoft in business — because by Goddess, they may write crappy insecure overpriced shoddy software, but on this one issue their half-assed semi-competent best is an order of magnitude better than we usually manage.
PERFECT!!!
Exactly why Linux is still sooo far from being usable.
This describes the typical experience of trying to configure pretty much anything in Linux.
Sometimes I re-format and re-install just to get a particular program or system installed, because the installation routine is so incomprehensibly difficult, and usually the distro installer will have a single checkbox for it.
You have no idea what it’s done, the distro installer normally puts the config in non-standard places, and it’s usually a fork of the normal version so that you’ll never be able to upgrade it, but…at least it installed.
Bearing in mind that the reformat takes at least a day (mainly fixing up all the things the installer has screwed up, re-installing lots of things by hand) it should be obvious how much time I’ve spent failing to install individual packages (sometimes more than a week for a single app!)
[quote]Hi,
To come back to linux being scrap for majority of end users thread, Eric S. Raymond has a good snapshot:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
[/quote]
A nice article. Probably more of these should be written to improve the situation. A point of critique: Raymond shouldn’t generalize too much.
Btw. which printer configuration tool did Raymond use? He should have written this (sorry if I didn’t find it), because I’d like to know what he is talking about.
Probably the first question of a configuration tool should be to ask about the user’s skill level (for instance “easy printing wizard” and “expert printer configuration”). It’s good if new users can accomplish simple tasks, but more complex configuration options shouldn’t be hidden from expert users. Context sensitive help is also an important point.