From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Rustom Mody Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Speeding up Emacs load time Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 20:59:08 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <271c3943-8659-4629-bcff-49f1fd8091f5@googlegroups.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1374379215 24830 80.91.229.3 (21 Jul 2013 04:00:15 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 04:00:15 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sun Jul 21 06:00:17 2013 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1V0koj-0005A6-QB for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sun, 21 Jul 2013 06:00:17 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:42085 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1V0koj-0000Jh-F6 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sun, 21 Jul 2013 00:00:17 -0400 X-Received: by 10.224.36.15 with SMTP id r15mr31211634qad.8.1374379149100; Sat, 20 Jul 2013 20:59:09 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.50.79.193 with SMTP id l1mr1011693igx.14.1374379149049; Sat, 20 Jul 2013 20:59:09 -0700 (PDT) Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!u2no233678qao.0!news-out.google.com!dk8ni860qab.0!nntp.google.com!f1no255552qae.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help In-Reply-To: Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=59.95.28.106; posting-account=mBpa7woAAAAGLEWUUKpmbxm-Quu5D8ui Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 59.95.28.106 User-Agent: G2/1.0 Injection-Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 03:59:09 +0000 Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:200018 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:92284 Archived-At: On Friday, July 19, 2013 10:54:21 PM UTC+5:30, Drew Adams wrote: > The only ambiguity in pointing is the precision of the pointer (and > your eye & hand). If you do something other than point then you need > to narrow things down in some other way until you have characterized > the object you want uniquely. That's a lot more complex in principle, > and often in practice too. And the lack of precision can be a bigger or smaller deal: replace mouse by= gun and click by shoot. If I were in William Tell's shoes I would prefer 10 decimal GPS coordinates= to trusting my sharp-shooting skills :-) Personally I find that the mouse hurts my hand and with a laptop touchpad I= have terrible precision. Of course all this does not change your basic point that 'direct' has a cer= tain well directness that inference/thinking/calculation cannot compare wit= h. I believe that this argument has got somewhat derailed by the polemic: "mou= se is stupid, keyboard is intelligent" Leaving aside the fact that in real life mice are more intelligent than key= boards, I believe the real division here is between functional and OO inter= face rather than keyboard vs mouse. A unix command-line or an interactive language prompt are examples of funct= ional interfaces. Conversely in windows when one points at something and the system magically= opens with word or excel or whatever, that is an OO interface. However clever emacs is, its unreasonable to ask it to know which file I wa= nt to edit. Invert the order of file and program and encode some info into= the extension and a system like windows gets it right... at least in the e= asy cases. Not so for the not easy cases: If one is looking at a matrix M in some math= software like mathematica, it again becomes unreasonable to demand that on= e can point to it and command DTRT! Because we may be wanting inversion, o= r eigenvalues, or multiply by something else or a dozen other reasonably li= kely options. IOW OO interfaces are intrinsically more dumbed-down than functional ones. = Sometimes we need the intelligent interface, sometimes the dumb one. tl;dr Point-n-click by default with power-user command-line available on call see= ms a sensible option. Starting an editor in lisp-interaction mode is perha= ps natural only if your name spells 'rms' :-)=20