My 0.002ÂŽ¤ (the 0 count is right). I apologize for the delay. >>>>> "MD" == Mathias Dahl writes: MD> "Christopher G D Tipper" writes: >> It just seems to be stuck in the 20th century with no sign of any >> attempt at modernisation. No "modern" program has the flexibility of Emacs. No modern editor is as good as Emacs. No modern editor is ready to do my work for me, Emacs does it often. MD> Although I agree somewhat I think you are a bit unfair. Lately it MD> has got some nie-looking tool bar, the file dialog when accessed MD> from the menu bar is quite good (at least on Windows), etc. It's good under Mac OS X, Linux when compiled wiht GTK and so on. (uh oh, the toolbar is cool looking, but I keep it disabled). >> 1 Text-wrapping. Text wrapping is a limitation, and it would be >> nice to scroll past the edge of the screen. This is particularly >> acute in my case editing XSLT scripts where line-breaks become a >> presentational issue. Sometimes I actually need to compose >> documents with 250 columns, and I don't appreciate emacs telling me >> otherwise. MD> Have you tried Ctrl-PgDown and Ctrl-PgUp? Works quite well. I too MD> miss a horizontal scroll bar sometimes though. Hmmmm... Even not using Ctrl-PgDown and Ctrl-PgUp I rarely feel the need of this when i set sqlplus line to 30000 characters and shot a sixty fields query (of course, sqlplus is controlled by emacs and its output goes in an Emacs buffer). With code... I feel that whenever you have to scroll past the edge of the screen there's something wrong either in your code or in the language design... Anyway I can deal with these situations disabling the text wrapping and using word or line moving commands. IMHO of course. >> 2 Shell open. Emacs really ought to be able recognise when the >> shell is requesting it to open a file. Gnu-client should be >> unnecessary in a modern application. MD> I agree with this and I really do not understand why it should be MD> that hard to "feel" if an Emacs instance is allready running, and MD> opening the file in that. But I am no low-level programmer, so I MD> would not know about technical limitations here. Emacs is the shell. gnuclient or emacsclient are still a very good solution since they are useful in al broader range of situations. They can help you with the clicky thing, but they are useful in many other situations, especially when you call anc Emacs function from OUTSIDE emacs, not only to invoke an existing emacs from the shell. >> 3 Tabbed buffers. Open buffers should be easily visible in a tabbed >> layout below the menu, in the manner of XEmacs. A proper history >> list would help here so that documents are persistent across >> sessions. MD> Personally, that tab-bar would be so crowded that the tabs would MD> not do any good. I tend to have many files and buffers open, MD> especially since emacs is more than a text editor for me (reading MD> news, mail, todolists, calendar etc etc). Btw, have you tried out MD> tabbar.el? I don't like it, but you might. I agree 100% >> 4 File Dialogs. I use dlgopen.el on Windows, which gets rid of the >> most serious interface issue of all, the lack of modern file >> dialogs. It wouldn't be rocket-science to adapt the interface to >> support this. XEmacs file dialogs are unusable IMHO. MD> On Windows, File -> Open File... works for me. I like to open the MD> files using the minibuffer though. Again. it works on Mac OS X, Linux (at least if compiled with GTK) MD> Basically I see where you are coming from, but by being a bit MD> flexible and accepting some "old quirks" (which seems to be really MD> thought through when you get used to it), I like it the way it MD> works. Just because something is not familiar does not meen that MD> it is bad. MD> IMHO, of course... :) Not just your opinion. I did a talk to our local FSUG, a simple introduction explaining how Emacs was born, how it was designed and so on. While workind on this talk I realized (mostly thanks to a Usenet post) that keybindings are choosen in a very smart way that considers how often you use them. CUA standard is ludicrous when compared to the wisdom behind Emacs keybinding choice. -- /\ ___ /___/\__|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____________________ //--\ | | \| | Integralista GNUslamico \/ e coltivatore diretto di software