Re: current directory

[vb <help-gnu-emacs@vsbe.com>]

On Saturday 21 October 2006 11:38, don provan wrote:
> vb <help-gnu-emacs@vsbe.com> writes:
> > well, this is becoming a philosophical issue, but I'll comment on it
> > anyways: as soon as somebody gets to decide what is good for other
> > people, the other people are in trouble.
>
> LOL! You obviously aren't very familiar with emacs! Emacs provides all
> manner of options for adjusting anything to any behavior that's ever
> been suggested by anyone for any reason. And then *on top of that* you
> can implement any changes, improvements, or additions with a little
> lisp code.
>

Well, indeed I am not very familiar with emacs - I've been using commercial 
products for long time, but changed employer recently and now have to use 
this "free" product.

> But the fact is that *something* has to be the default behavior, and
> in this case, the per-buffer current directory is an outstanding
> choice. The only reason it might give people some trouble is that more
> trivial editors encourage you to invoke the editor one time for one
> file, and then invoke it again for another file, etc., so that there's
> a one-to-one correspondence between editor session and file. 

oh, well, it obviously has been a very long time since looked around beyond 
your beloved emacs. Pretty much any editor these days allows to edit more 
than one file at a time.

> Emacs is 
> a development system, so most people use it to look at or modify many
> files in any given session. (Some people go so far as to use a single
> emacs sessions as their *entire user environment* and don't do
> *anything* outside emacs!) 

And I feel sorry for these people :-)

> In that situation, it would be *insane* to 
> insist that the user keep in mind some arbitrary "current directory"
> based on how emacs was invoked the very first time when there's a very
> specific and obvious directory location staring the user in the face.
>

no, it would not be insane at all. All other editors but emacs I am used to 
maintain a notion of "current directory" and allow the user to change this 
current directory explicitly. The fact that emacs doesn't even have an 
infrastructure for that just shows how off mark its approach is.

> > Again, I am all for emacs doing whatever whoever thinks is good. But
> > let those who feel otherwise do what they want - otherwise this is
> > like a communist society: driving people to their happiness with an
> > iron fist.
>
> Fight on, Dude!
>
> > say I am editing a file which is longer than a few screenfulls. I
> > hit the 'page up' key a few times, and then hit the 'page down' key
> > the same number of times. I get back the screen there was
> > originally, but the cursor now is in the first line, not where it
> > was before these page scrolls.
>
> I'm not sure what editor you're thinking of, but what the other
> editors I'm familiar with do is leave the cursor on a page that you
> aren't currently looking at, making it amusing and confusing when you
> issue a command that actually depends on a cursor location that is not
> long in view.

As I said, look around, check out Crisp for instance, you would be surprised: 
no long keystrokes, much wider use of keys (say astersk on the numeric keypad 
and on the main keyboard are naturally assigned to different key codes _ 
still have to find the way to achieve this with emacs, and I've tried!). You 
can write macros in object oriented c-like language, not in this weird lisp 
which is a remnant of computing stone age (I know, I know that it is still 
used to teach students).

Again, what's the point of moving the cursor to  the first line of the screen 
when somebody does page up/page down sequence? I know about setting the mark 
thing someone suggested here, but why would one need to hit extra keystrokes 
- it is only natural to hit a key a few times and hit an opposite action key 
for a few times and return exactly to the state you were when you started.

This works with arrow left/right, arrow up/down, but doesn't with page up/down 
- this is just inconsistent and shows the lack of thought of the editor  
designer.

> While someone mentioned a workaround, really the problem 
> is that you aren't using the editor to accomplish what *you* want.
> Isn't what you really want to do hold your place with a finger, go off
> and look at something somewhere else, and then return to your finger?
> Emacs provides "marks" to do exactly that, so you can return to
> exactly the original spot with a single command rather than manually
> returning the view back to the original location by remembering how
> many pages you've moved up or down and issuing that many page movement
> command to get back.
>

as I said, I know about the marks, what I intuitively want is that if I make a 
few steps in one direction, and then a few steps in the opposite direction - 
I end up exactly where I started.

> Or, to summarize, you seem to have been trained by simple editors and
> developed techniques to deal with them because they're so stupid. 

Oh, let me repeat myself, you seem to have been stuck with emacs not seeing 
all other ideas and approaches there are around.

The only advantage of emacs is that it is free. All my colleagues who are 
using it (and I have seen many tens of those in years) use it with very 
little modifications, never know how to do even simple things beyond the very 
basic functions.

I just made an effort to learn lisp and am just now starting to see some ways 
of making this editor to do what I want, but boy do I consider this time 
wasted - I should have payed for my personal copy of Crisp instead ;-)

> You 
> might want to -- but I'm not forcing you! -- step back and think about
> what *you* really want to do when you're editing, and I wonder if you
> won't find that emacs provides a easy way to do *that* rather than an
> way to continue jumping through the hoops that your old editor taught
> you to jump through. You might find that the real bad guy here is your
> old editor....
>
> -don
> 
Don, all being said, I really appreciate your effort and suggestions, I sure 
don't want to discourage anyone from using emacs, I just want you hard core 
emacs guys recognize that there is life outside emacs :-)

cheers,
/vb


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