Xref: utzoo comp.editors:195 comp.sources.bugs:1031
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!sun!breakpoint!jpayne
From: jpayne%breakpoint@Sun.COM (Jonathan Payne)
Newsgroups: comp.editors,comp.sources.bugs
Subject: Re: Misbehavior in Jove
Message-ID: <56916@sun.uucp>
Date: 17 Jun 88 00:22:49 GMT
References: <212@isl.stanford.edu> <8181@ihlpa.ATT.COM> <5584@xanth.cs.odu.edu> <3974@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: jpayne@sun.UUCP (Jonathan Payne)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 35


JOVE behaves the same way as the tops20 emacs that I had the manual for
when I first started.  At one point I just decided that for as many
commands as possible I was going to mimic as closely as possible the
original emacs.  What motivated me to do this was when I first discovered
Gosling's emacs (which admittedly became the source of good ideas for
JOVE) and I typed C-X C-F to find a file and instead it wrote all my
modified buffers and exit!  For the most part I have just assumed that
Stallman's interface is the best, since he seems to be really good at
such things.  In fact, one of the few differences that sticks in my mind
is the C-N at the end of the buffer, which in Stallman's emacs inserts a
newline (if no numeric argument is supplied).  I hated that feature from
the first day I used TORES (Text ORiented Editing System), which was sort
of a one buffer, one window, no features, emacs for the pdp11, and when I
tried to put it in JOVE (even though I hated it) I got yelled at by
everybody in the community.  So ...

As a side comment, one of the things I think that went wrong in going
from Stallman's tops20 emacs to gnu is the way buffers are used to handle
what used to be called typeout, e.g, what you get when you type '?'
during file name completion, and when you list buffers.  When I first saw
that in Gosling's I thought that was the greatest idea, and it gave me a
whole new way of looking at writing JOVE, and I went straight home and
implemented it.  But eventually I realized that I hated it and
implemented true typeout, and God what a relief it was!  Actually, now
it's an option to say whether to use buffers or not.  That way, when you
want your describe-command output to stick around, there's a way to do
it.  But how often do you want a list of buffers to stick around?

Anyway, I used to ask my computer teacher how a command should behave, and
he always said see how Stallman did it.  That's what I did with
capitalize-word or whatever it's called.  I've gotten real good at typing
ESC - ESC C to capitalize the word I missed, and so often I have to
capitalize starting from the middle of a word, for instance Postscript
... oops, I meant a capital S, as in PostScript...I think Stallman was
right.