Re: .emacs poser

[Dale Snell <ddsnell@frontier.com>]

On Tue, 17 Dec 2013 04:16:04 +0100
Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:

> Dale Snell <ddsnell@frontier.com> writes:
> 
> > I can't speak for European keyboards.
> 
> The US layout is better for programming but those chars
> are not as goofy as those you use. Semi-colon, and all
> the brackets, are better placed on the US layout
> keyboard, and for whatever language-specific chars you
> need, there is the compose key.

The compose key is good.  Now if I could just set my system up so
that the Windows-Menu key worked as a compose key in both X and
Linux VTs.

> Which by the way is another solution that I think is
> much better than setting this up in Emacs.
> 
> > and the ever popular copyright (©), trademark (™),
> > and registered trademark signs (®).
> 
> Serious?

Serious, unfortunately.  Twas Corporate Policy.  Any brand or
trade name must be given the proper attribution and trademark
symbol.  So things like "Microsoft Word" became "Microsoft®
Word®".  Every. Freaking. Time.  Arrgh.

> > If I need anything more demanding, like en and em
> > dashes, or primes instead of quotes, I'll fire up a
> > text processor
> 
> A word processor? Like OpenOffice or Word?

Gak!  No!  Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons, no!  TEXT processor.  I
loathe word processores, Word, LibreOffice, Abiword, whatever.
They give me the screaming heebie-geebies whenever I have to use
one of them.  Give me Emacs and Groff or TeX.

> > There are certain organizations that want their
> > documents written in a certain format, which may
> > include Pilcrow and Section marks, and other such
> > things.  Happily, I don't deal with those.  (Again,
> > I'd use LaTeX or Groff for that.)
> 
> Groff! Wow, you are a man (pun) of many surprises. Is
> that used outside of the Unix manpages world?

Well, obviously I use it.  (I find Groff with the Mom macro set
very comfortable to use when writing prose.)  But yes, there are
folks who don't write man pages who use Groff.  Some write books
with it, both technical and fiction.  It's not as flexible as TeX,
but then, what is?  That said, if I had to write a math-heavy
book, or one with lots of nuclear chemistry, I'd use TeX.  Groff
and eqn are nice for light math work, but TeX is the Queen! of
beautiful math.

> LaTeX is great obviously. I would drop the word
> processor and use Emacs (or Vim) + LaTeX.

If I didn't have Groff, I'd go with LaTeX, definitely.  With
Emacs, of course.  (BTW, does anybody still use Lout?)

> > That's limiting yourself.  If you need accented
> > characters, learn how to enter them in a general way,
> > not just specific words.
> 
> It is not about *ability*, it is about *speed* and
> *ergonomics* and *limiting the mental effort* when
> doing a routine thing, as typing. To memorize and type
> some four or five hit combination just to get a goofy
> char that is (almost) never used doesn't make sense.

Time for the compose key?  :-)  Honestly, I've used the "C-x 8"
sequence so much it's second nature by now.

But I think we'll have to agree to disagree, here.  I am going to
investigate Drew's ucs-cmds.el library; it looks interesting.
Besides, I think we're getting a bit off-topic here.

--Dale

--
I recall hearing that highly-classified data must be destroyed by
physically shredding the medium.  Yes, throw your disk drive in
the shredder!  (Just imagine the class of machinery required to
digest an RA81 HDA.)  -- Mark Wood on linux-kernel