Re: [External] : Re: Gitlab Migration

[Barry Fishman <barry@ecubist.org>]

On 2021-09-06 23:16:19 -04, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > > `C-x` for "Cut" has been standard for a lot more than a decade.
>
>   > CUA was first published in 1987, so nearly three and a half decaces :-)
>
> Emacs (the PDP-10 version) was first released in 1976.
> CUA came second.

<TLDR>
Lets just say I find this slow creep of small changes, without any
understandable, cohesive long term plan, and requiring a continual
effort on my part to keep my own environment stable, a large continual
sink of my time.
</TLDR>

Emacs has also evolved over that amount of time.  Commands are fit into
an integrated whole, and changed to make things work better.

Subsets of commands are used in other tools like Readline, and seen in
programs like Rlwrap, Bash, Clisp, and Gnome (prior to GTK-4). It was
available also for a long time in Firefox.

In the applications where it has be removed, there is also a gross
removal of a lot of functionality (Such as Gnome-4).  Why is it
important to have C-p print the current page in Firefox rather than fit
into a set of commands to move the cursor in a text entry buffer?  Text
entry has become hell for me, when my fingers go off and do thinks
automatically.  How often do you want to print the current page, and you
can just select print from a menu.

I'm concerned that no attention seem so be given to Emacs's whole
functionality and ease of use, but just shoe-horning in things like CUA,
which to my mind has a negative effect on usability.

That is even ignoring having to relearn a large set commands that in the
end is less well thought out.

Do you have accepted code for all the programs that use Emacs style
bindings?  How are we supposed to navigate the transition where many of
us use a variety of systems with varying version of Emacs and Readline
being used.  In particular when working on slow moving systems like
Debian servers, where we may not have the ability to rebuild (and
sometimes rethink) all our tools.

I made my major transition to Emacs when I was forced by my employer to
move my development environment from Sun to Windows.  Emacs was a way to
exist on Windows while I transitioned my working environment.  I found
that Emacs often had better tools for me that he Microsoft ones I was
learning.  It certainly had a better C++ class browser.  [I wasn't there
very long.]

I find that making the transition easier for people raised on Microsoft
or Apple to GNU/Linux should include the appreciation of an environment
where you no longer had to sit by and hope that your platform made
things better for you, but you could gain some control yourself.
Otherwise we are just making GNU/Linux (Gnome|Plasma) no better, and
often worse that the heavily financed platform they would be leaving.

-- 
Barry Fishman