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]

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

[liam_on_linux]

(Certain grammatical solecisms due to a serious refactoring to get it under 4300 characters.)

[dougs]

I spend most of my working life (apart from those parts that I spend in front of Windows servers) in front of Linux servers, which don't have CUA editors but do have vi. And therefore vi is part of my mandatory clueset, just as CUA is part of yours. No argument, we just work in different environments.

[liam_on_linux]

Yup, as I (belatedly) acknowledged.

And you're right, especially these days, I could run vi on virtually anything. Emacs ditto. I don't actually want to - I just want one of 'em to play nice with the muscle-memory I've been building up since I was about 22.

I still remember those days vividly (as old people are wont to do.)

It was an almost physical relief when I stopped having to remember if it was Shift-F7 or /WS or Esc-T-S or ^KS to save and could just go Alt-F, S - or failing that, use the mouse to do the same thing - regardless of what program I was in on whatever OS. It was SO GOOD. Finally, the nasty was going away. Finally, common sense was prevailing.

Of course, an incalculably vast number of new nasties have come along since, ones I couldn't even imagine. But CUA was *such* a good thing.

So I am somewhat excited at one of the 2 big editing heavyweights joining the party.