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From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: UNIX needs a real text editor
Message-ID: <9801@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 13 Mar 89 20:27:21 GMT
References: <9059@claris.com> <9844@ihlpb.ATT.COM>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 68

In article <9844@ihlpb.ATT.COM> gregg@ihlpb.ATT.COM (Wonderly) writes:
>And what happens when you sit down to help somebody with something and they
>don't have *macs set up the way you do?  Can you shift gears and learn their
>brand of mappings in short order?

The odds are that if I sit down to help somebody, I'm not going to be
doing something so complex that I'm going to run head-on into their
emacs bindings.  In fact, the odds are that if I'm sitting down to
help someone, they don't know enough to have added any major
customizations to emacs :-)

The fact of that matter is that while many people add custom hacks to
their own personal .emacs file, I've never known anyone to decide that
^n and ^p should no longer move up and down a line, or that ^x ^s
should no longer save a file.  If somebody has hacked their emacs so
much that I can't move around it, then they're probably beyond help
:-)

>                                   If so, you could probably learn vi or
>the standard mappings for *macs as well instead of working yourself into a
>state of dependence on something that is so incompatible with other
>environments.

I don't "depend" on the changes I've made to emacs.  I like them and
they make my work easier, but when my fileserver is down and I have to
login without all of my elisp hacks, I can get by quite well, thank
you, with mimimal (if any) adjustment.  As I said, most people's
addition to the standard emacs are *enhancements*, not outright
modifications of the emacs command structure.

>               Seriously, I thought it was common knowledge that right
>or wrong standard ways and methods yield common knowledge and higher
>productivity!

It is only necessary to insure a basic level of common knowledge --
how to move the cursor around, how to save or load a file, how to
search for a string or replace it.  Once again, as I said above, most
people who use emacs don't change these things, and if they do, you
can always start up an emacs -q or jove and work with that if you need
to help them.

>               That is precisely why you won't see me using zillions of
>aliases and shell scripts.  I have a few, but just enough to get by, like
>alias ls="ls -CF".  If a tool doesn't do the right thing to begin with,
>I find it hard to believe that the tool is worthy of being called a tool!

I tend to make sure that I know the default behavior and any
customized behavior I've constructed for any program that I use.  If I
am going to help someone else and I suspect that they've made
modifications that will conflict with mine, a quick "/bin/csh -f" will
put me into a shell with no customizations; if I want, I can even
source the .cshrc out of my account and get my environment, or I can
work with the defaults, since I know what they are.

>The 'right thing' is hard to define, but certainly the fact that so many
>people change and add mappings to *macs says something!

You seem to think that customizations are an abnormality and something
that should be avoided.  Modifications to the accepted standards are
sometimes a problem, but enhancements are not; if you can't learn to
step around somebody's enhancements the few times that you have to, it
seems to me that you're just asking to be restricted to only one type
of editor -- yours, the way you like it.

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
MIT Project Athena				410 Memorial Drive, No. 223F
jik@Athena.MIT.EDU				Cambridge, MA 02139-4318
Office: 617-253-4261			      Home: 617-225-8218