Toward a "modern" Emacs [LWN.net]

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 29, 2020 7:41 UTC (Tue) by jem (subscriber, #24231)
In reply to: Toward a "modern" Emacs by gus3
Parent article: Toward a "modern" Emacs

This is getting ridiculous. The task at hand obviously is not easily solvable by a "complete novice" of any tool, unless the tool is specifically coded for the task. It is definitely not solvable by the praised Emacs competitors like Atom and VS Code, without coding an extension in Typescript or some such. In Emacs the needed pieces are readily available, and if you don't feel like reading the manual you may be able to find someone who can whip up a semi-friendly front end that makes use of the existing Emacs csv-mode and org-mode packages.

You don't need to read 600 pages of manual to start using Emacs. You can start using it just like Windows Notepad (or a Notepad-like editor like VS Code): open a file by choosing Open File... in the File menu. Move around in the text using the arrow keys (or Ctrl-arrow for moving by word), the Page Up and Page Down keys, Home, End, Ctrl-Home, Ctrl-End. Edit the text using the Backspace and Delete keys; again, you can combine these keys with Ctrl to delete by word. Click on and select text using the mouse, if that's the way you want to work.

Unfortunately, for historical reasons, a few common Ctrl key combinations are different, so you will have to learn the Emacs alternatives for cut, copy, paste and undo (which, by the way, are also available for selection in the Edit menu). Oh well, I guess that's too much for the typical attention span of people today...

One more thing: the Real CUA key combinations for cut (Shift-Del), copy (Ctrl-Ins) and paste (Shift-Ins) are also available. Apple forced us to learn new key combinations for those functions.

to post comments

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 29, 2020 9:00 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> You can start using it just like Windows Notepad (or a Notepad-like editor like VS Code): open a file by choosing Open File... in the File menu.
I've actually tried this route back in 2006. And quickly discarded it. Back at that time I was already used to a "standard" layout: the project tree in the left and the tabbed editor on the right.

When you open a file in Emacs you get a full screen of it. There are no tabs and navigation between open files (who said "buffers"?) is NOT trivial. And it's a completely different model from everything else.

So basically you HAVE to start with reading the manual and un-learning all the muscle memory. CUA mode doesn't particularly help. As far as I remember, even text selection worked differently (not the usual shift+movement keys).

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 30, 2020 2:20 UTC (Wed) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (1 responses)

Omitting the Emacs/Unix-specific step of invoking LaTeX, Excel or just about any spreadsheet can do it just fine. Again, the old joke is "Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor". Why should I open a CSV file in a text editor and expect it to be treated like a spreadsheet?

> One more thing: the Real CUA key combinations for cut (Shift-Del), copy (Ctrl-Ins) and paste (Shift-Ins) are also available. Apple forced us to learn new key combinations for those functions.

Because the original ones were horrible? Maybe if any two keyboards kept Del and Ins in the same spot, I could learn to touch-type with them, but that would still require moving my right hand from the normal position.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 30, 2020 6:26 UTC (Wed) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

>Omitting the Emacs/Unix-specific step of invoking LaTeX, Excel or just about any spreadsheet can do it just fine. Again, the old joke is "Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor".

I really doubt a complete novice (not my words) could do it with Excel either. But the general expectation seems to be that if you are unable to do something in Excel, then "stop complaining and start learning". My objection was directed at commenter pgdx who complained that if a "complete novice" can't do this convoluted task without reading 600 pages of manual then "then that is where you have lost 90% of users." Isn't it a bit unfair to expect Emacs to enable someone who has always lived under a rock to be able to handle CSV files using it, without first learning the basics?

Another joke is that Emacs stands for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". Oh, the horror.

>Why should I open a CSV file in a text editor and expect it to be treated like a spreadsheet?

You don't have to, if you don't want to. I guess the example was just to demonstrate how powerful and extendible Emacs is. If you don't care about org-mode or csv-mode, then please ignore them. They don't bloat Emacs, other than taking up a bit of disk space.

>Because the original ones were horrible? Maybe if any two keyboards kept Del and Ins in the same spot, I could learn to touch-type with them, but that would still require moving my right hand from the normal position.

My comment on the CUA key bindings was written with tongue in cheek. My point was that key bindings have not been set in stone since the beginning of the IT era, and also that talking about Ctrl-x/c/v as "Common User Access Keys" is a misnomer.