[aklug] Re: really tiny text editor with emulation

From: Christopher Howard <christopher.howard@frigidcode.com>
Date: Thu Apr 18 2013 - 07:49:01 AKDT

On 04/17/2013 11:19 PM, Arthur Corliss wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Christopher Howard wrote:
>
>
> Everyone's entitled to their own subjective reality. Emacs just felt...
> ponderous to me.
>

I see the flamewar spirit is strong in this one.

>
> You might consider that perhaps everyone you know isn't a power user.
> Sure,
> I know a ton of people who can *use* vi/vim. But the number who are really
> good with it are in the vast minority. I'd wager that for many common,
> repetitive tasks it can be done in vi than emacs in fewer keystrokes. I've
> known some emac'ers that can keep pace, but that's usually with some level
> of customizations, not out of the box.
>

Answered in my last e-mail to Royce.

> To be fair, vim is extremely customizable, and I've taken advantage of that
> to speed up my common coding tasks (running through lint/taint checks,
> calling up perldoc references for functions/modules, applying code
> formatting rules, etc., etc.). But, there's nothing you've stated above
> that vim doesn't have.
>

Great! (If true.)

>
> Ah, sounds like the Windows and/or systemd disease, which is 180 degrees
> from UNIX philosophy. While some people have coded mail, file browsers,
> and
> other lunacy in vim as well, I just want my editor to be what it should be:
> and editor. Do one thing, and do it damned well. Not everything, much of
> which is half-assed.
>

Whoa there, buddy! Comparing Emacs to Windows and systemd, really? What
about Nazi's or Communists too?

Emacs isn't just an editor. Emacs is an extensible, modular programming
environment tailored for text editing. Complaining that Emacs tries to
do to much is like saying that Python tries to do too much. They are
both designed ultimately to do whatever the heck you want, within the
limitations of certain paradigms.

You can restrict Emacs to core functionality, by not loading the modules
you don't want. Of course, most people want the very useful
functionality, so the modules are loaded by default. Of course, you
can't quite strip Emacs down to bare text editor functionality (i.e.,
just the key bindings, and save/load functionality, and perhaps macros,
if you wish to define it that way) because then it ceases to be Emacs
(see above paragraph). But it is very easy to program such an editor
(e.g., the one I started this thread about), and there is no reasons
such an editor can't be as ubiquitous on systems as Vi. Except that most
of the people creating these distros are rabid Vi fans, and they pick
what they want.

>
> On one hand it's really great that you're learning the depths of your
> preferred tool. On the other, you're crippling yourself if you ever intend
> to be efficiently productive in as many environments as possible. Vi is
> always guaranteed to be on every POSIX-compliant UNIX out there. Emacs is
> almost like finding a unicorn these days. Go into a large scale enterprise
> server environment and you'll be hard pressed to find it. *Especially* if
> it's a heterogenous UNIX environment.
>

Oh, boo hoo. One day in the distant future I might work for some idiot
boss who is to stubborn to let me install Emacs. In that case, I'd
install it myself from source in my local directory. (Yes, I know how to
do this.) Or I'd work from my laptop, since Emacs has tramp support, and
I know about wonderful things like sshfs.

BTW, I actually worked in a large scale enterprise server environment -
a supercomputing center. All the software they have is ancient, but they
still have Gnu Emacs - on every system.

I'm not sure about the "heterogenous" issue. I thought we had solved
that with POSIX and all the other wonderful standards. At least enough
to get a no-X Emacs installed. But evidently there is some decrepit
environment out there somewhere that you have been forced to work in.

> I'm not loading up a gargantuan demi-OS to edit
> one line in freaking /etc/hosts.allow or what have you...
>

Well, what I actually do is load up my demi-OS, and then use that
instance to open and edit every file I work on throughout the whole day.

-- 
frigidcode.com

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Received on Thu Apr 18 07:49:15 2013

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