Re: Default Emacs keybindings (was: Re: Menu suggestion)

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@glug.org>]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

   As long as the superuser can't with a good conscience throw
   Emacs at his users, he is not free to use the editor he
   prefers.

because naked emacs may be seen as an unkindness in some
cultures, the crafty superuser throws instead an emacs wrapped
in session-, site-, or user-specific customizations.

   If somebody asks me about a text manipulation problem, and
   I tell him "just use this one-liner in Emacs" and he says
   "Forget it.  I don't have a week to spare.  How do I do
   this in KEdit?", this ultimately forces me to acquire
   skills with inferior tools in order to kludge along.

or you could write the one-liner into a file, add five lines
of comment and/or docstring, and place the file in some shared
directory where it can be accessed in the future, and studied
and improved as time permits.  this can be done by all users.

   The question "is it really worth it?" should, if possible,
   not come up again and again.

IMHO, that kind of question is always pertinent.  the answer
may gradually shift from no to yes, as the environment (which
includes machines, regular users, and any superusers floating
in the vicinity) changes.  if the answer does not shift and
the superusers floating in the vicinity do not effect change,
that says more about those superusers than the question.  if
the answer shifts from yes to no precisely due to actions of
the superusers floating in the vicinity, the situation has
degraded into the hell of proprietary software, which is in
the case of emacs, ironic, and in any case, sad.

thi