ErgoEmacs: Emacs, dragged kicking & screaming into the 1990s!

[liam_on_linux]

I have long had a (very) idle dream about learning enough eLisp to convert Emacs, which I gather is quite phenomenally powerful and all that -- Neal Stephenson says so and he is as a god to me -- into an actual usable modern editor. I.e. something that looks and works like Notepad or Gedit or MS-DOS Editor: a basic CUA interface, because those are

Comments

[dougs]

#insert std-vi-emacs-flame-war.h

[liam_on_linux]

True enough

[hobnobs]

> But I am not on either side, really. Broadly, I've hated them both since I first encountered them

Not really hated them, but I've certainly never really got on with either of them myself and always preferred to use JOE as my editor of choice. (Which is very easy to use if you are familiar with WordStar. :) )

[liam_on_linux]

I was once, but I really, really don't want to go back. Really.

TBH I didn't like it at the time. I didn't like WordPerfect much, either.

Things like block-highlighting for cut&paste as well as formatting just make sense to me.

Text Editors

[livejournal]

User dougs referenced to your post from Text Editors saying: [...] This is a question about what you use when you want to edit a file that contains text. [ Context [...]

[dougs]

A new point, and one on which I might wish to base my actual recommendation:

One of the most powerful features a text editor can have is familiarity. Discuss.

Oh, wait, that's more-or-less you were saying right at the start about keybindings and muscle memory. And the things that are burned into my muscle memory are flipping from edit mode to command mode and back (because, after all, in a text editor you do two kinds of things; typing text, and manipulating text in other ways), putting text into multiple distinct named buffers, navigating to distant parts of the file by context, and doing versatile transformations with regular expressions. Using sequences of keystrokes that you can use everywhere else on a Unix/Linux/cygwin system in tools like grep and sed.

Looks like we're just familiar with different editors. Goodness me.

[liam_on_linux]

A fair point & I can't deny it.

It may be our different-worlds thing.

I learned wordprocessing & text editing on a Sinclair Spectrum, then moved to a VAX, then an Amstrad PCW. All pretty different.

Then it was over to PCs & soon after Macs. Macs are Macs - the same basic commands & keystrokes worked in Word, Jazz, More!, WriteNow, MacWrite, MacAuthor, &c. &c. PCs in the days of DOS were horrid - I had to learn the totally different command sets of WordStar, WordStar 2000, WordStar 1512 (a version of Wordstar Express) - yes, all totally different - & DisplayWrite, MultiMate, Word 3, WordPerfect, Samna Executive & others I've probably blanked. (& of course almost any app with an inbuilt text editor.)

I had to support all of those, so I had to know them. I also learned vi on SCO Xenix around then

[dougs]

There is a standard set of command-line options and commands for text processors (grep/egrep/fgrep, sed, awk, ed, em, ex and vi), and has been for 43 years. Comply, or chose another alternative that you're familiar with.

[liam_on_linux]

No, there's a set of somewhat-standardised Unixisms that work across most Unixes most of the time, and there is what is, these days, *the* standard command structure that works on *everything* INCLUDING Unix if you're working at GUI level

[dougs]

( I just typed :q to close this tab instead of ctrl-F4)

[liam_on_linux]

I thought this might amuse...

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1709231

«
Pirate Dave
vi...

"getting hideously stuck inside vi, unable to recall the correct exit keystrokes, and so trampling all over the edit I have just made."

That sounds like a normal vi session for me. The only thing more unbearable than vi's wonderful interface (do I hit "ESC" or ":" now?) is trying to reverse-engineer what RMS was tripping on when he wrote emacs. Nano is almost always the first thing I install on a new Linux box. It helps make life worth living as a Linux admin.
»

Greater context:
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/01/29/verity_stob_raspberry_pi

[liam_on_linux]

PhilBuk

[liam_on_linux]

And more...

Paul Hovnanian
Re: The vi thing

Trouble with the vi UI? I don't believe it! What could be simpler?

--

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