Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!think!barmar
From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: UNIX needs a real text editor
Message-ID: <37441@think.UUCP>
Date: 13 Mar 89 21:16:19 GMT
References: <9059@claris.com> <9844@ihlpb.ATT.COM> <9801@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Sender: news@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@brigit.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 23

In article <9801@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:
>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 :-)

I used to have a coworker who I helped out quite a bit (often helping
him debug his Emacs extensions).  He had a whole bunch of extensions
to bind the function keys on his Honeywell terminal to common
operations.  Unfortunately, the escape sequences sent by the function
keys conflicted with many standard Emacs key bindings, such as esc-B.
This is the only time I've ever had trouble sitting down at someone
else's terminal.  I think this is more the exception than the rule
(even if lots of people bind function keys, most terminals' function
keys send multi-character sequences beginning with a common escape
sequence so not too many Emacs key bindings are affected).

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar