Re: Help for eclipse

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

adrians <nmanole@gmail.com> writes:

> Emanuel, so based on your extensive experience with
> Eclipse it's a total pain?

I don't need extensive experience with Eclipse to know
it sucks. I have very specific and well-defined
parameters for what makes for good software. I can use
just about any application and instantly know if it is
software that "is me" or not.

> Right. I can tell you from having used if for a heck
> of a lot longer than you used it for that, configured
> with the proper settings, it can be significantly
> snappier than Emacs - at least under Windows.

Snappy on Windows - isn't that a contradiction in
terms?

> In fact the general clunkiness of Emacs' scrolling
> still bothers the heck out of me.

(setq scroll-conservatively 10000)
(setq auto-window-vscroll nil)

Emacs is programmable - more on scrolling (one line at
a time or in panes; left-to-right; etc.): [1]

> As for which of these two environments is easier to
> get accustomed to for someone new to them, please
> don't suggest that it's Emacs.

I don't care for new users that are negativistic about
it. I was a new user once as well and while I read two
books I used Emacs simultaneously and every day made
improvements - to Emacs (as I saw it), and to my own
understanding of it (and those two qualities are not
easily separable after a while) - and never did I
feel it was unpleasant or burdensome - the only thing I
regret was being a bit too public about it, so people
got expedition fever, and I didn't understand that, and
got into some flame wars. Well, hell. Other than that,
configuring/programming Emacs and learning Lisp was a
wonderful experience, and I'm happy every day that I
have a system which is to 95% exactly what I want.

> For years now, Eclipse has had straightforward UI
> discoverability through the use of Ctrl-3 which
> allows you to search through all commands, views,
> menus, etc., from one spot.

Menus! - why don't you go use Finder if you like menus
so much? (But there are GUI menus in the X version of
Emacs, so that shouldn't be a problem for you if you
really want them.) As for online help that's very
elaborate in Emacs with the the dynamic docstring system
that lets you add documentation at the same place as
the code, and where documentation becomes instantly
available at the moment that code is made available.

> Just to be clear, I'm not contesting Emacs' greater
> extensibility and power overall, just your statement
> that Eclipse is "a pain" and, by implication, that
> Emacs is not, from a noob's perspective.

Emacs is much better in every aspect than Eclipse but I
don't think there is any implication at work.

[1] http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/conf/emacs-init/scroll.el

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