Re: beginner questions

[JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com>]

Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:
> 
>> Can't use my favorite editor any more (long story, don't ask:),
>> and decided to go with emacs. Of course, there are zillions of
>> tutorials, etc, but most are almost-infinitely wordy, whereas
>> I'm comfortable with editors and basically want a cheat sheet.
>> But even they're usually too long, with lots of arcane commands
>> that I'm sure I'll eventually want to know, but not while I'm
>> still trying to remember how to cut-and-paste.
>>   So I started making my own  forkosh.com/emacs.txt  but am
>> having difficulty zeroing in on some info.
>>   Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
>> no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
>> <h2>stuff</h2> underlined. 

> M-x fundamental-mode RET
>    This gives you the basic editor features and nothing more.
> M-x text-mode RET
>    is designed to edit natural language texts (paragraphs, lines,
> words, characters).  It may not be useful to edit code, which is
> structured quite differently from natural language text.

Thanks, Pascal, that's perfect. Don't know how I missed it
during maybe ~5 minutes trying various google queries.

>> And really annoying, I don't want
>> the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
>> Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
>> I just want a dumb editor in the sense that it shouldn't think
>> it knows >>anything<< about the language/syntax I'm writing in,
>> regardless of filename extension. It should just see a stream
>> of uninterpreted characters, unless it sees C- or M- (or
>> something with special emacs significance).
>
> Yep, fundamental-mode will give you that.
Yep, works great.

>> And various and sundry minor questions, e.g., what exactly
>> is the undo scope of C-/ and how do you just undo "last keystroke",
>> and no more than that (if last keystroke was a C-y then, okay,
>> undo the entire yank)?
> 
> It seems to me, history coalesce input, so that undo can't undo text
> entry character by character, (unless you separate each character by
> some other command, such as cursor move).  Other than that, it seems to
> me that undo works like that, undoing one command at a time.

No big problem, I don't suppose. I guess I'll get used to it.
Just caused me some minor inconvenience when it behaved
unexpectedly (unexpected to me, that is) and undid lots more
than I'd intended. I'm just being more careful now, until
I comfortably know what to actually expect.

>> Finally, have I missed some tutorial/cheat-sheet-type info designed
>> for my kind of needs -- already familiar with various languages
>> and editors, and just wants to get down to work using emacs?
>> Just wants the 100 or so most used commands "telegraphed", without
>> more extra words than necessary? Thanks,
> 
> http://cs.iupui.edu/~kweimer/EmacsCheatSheet.pdf
> seems to be a nice and short cheat sheet.

Thanks, again, Pascal. That's perfect, too. Just what I wanted,
and had also failed to find (neither that nor anything close to it)
during google searches.

> Now of course, the big win of emacs, is when you activate those modes
> that provide automatic features specific to the kind of document you're
> editing and its syntax. So fundamental-mode is not used often. But I
> agree that it may help for newbies, to start with it, and add layers and
> tools later.

Yeah, I peeked at your informatimago.com homepage, and saw all
your gpl'ed emacs tools. The asm7090 seemed especially unusual.
I started with keypunches (and that's 026's), and ran stuff
on the 7040 in CCNY's EE dept a long (long,...) time ago.
But the creation date on your pjb-asm7090.el is 2005-06-04.
Somebody still emulating that somewhere?
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )