Re: How to get rid of *GNU Emacs* buffer on start-up?

[Xah Lee <xah@xahlee.org>]

On Sep 22, 9:58 am, Sean Sieger <sean.sie...@gmail.com> wrote:
> XahLee<x...@xahlee.org> writes:
>
>     Execuse my French
>
> Is that what language you write in?  It looks like poorly written and
> proofed English.  Or, do you mean French is another programming language
> that you're not proficient in?
>
>     Ok, quickly typed out n no time to edit.
>
> You're starting to see what I see.  You mentioned your typing speed---as
> a secretary, I think you said---was `80 wpm'.  Usually,Xah, erroneous
> typing doesn't count, it diminishes your score.  The way you type leads
> me to believe that you don't touch-type well on Qwerty or Dvorak
> keyboards.  I don't mean to insult you, but rather point out the
> incongruity with your seemingly immense interest in ergonomic typing
> configurations.  My experience has been that good typists, well, type
> well ... in some language.
>
> I hope you find a text editor and a mail list that you are happy with
> some day.

Huh?

You want to compare typing speed? This we can actually carry out
online. One way, is to go to a public irc such as freenode's, then
there are a lot public websites that score your typing speed. So, we
meet in irc, agree before hand what nick name to use for the typing
websites, then in real time each of us go type and get the score, then
we can compare the score.

Sure, it's not a complete fool proof way to compete typing speed, but
it's fairly practical.

You want to see my typing speed (counting accuracy) beat the hell of
ya ass? Let's meet in irc. Let me offer you the address:
irc.freenode.net, channel #elisp or channel #xahlee. You can arrange a
time n i'll be there.

One time, i challenged a lisp coder aka campbell(sp?) on irc. (the
author of emacs's parenedit mode, real name Taylor something i think
(too lazy to check)) He's score actually beat me by some margin and i
was shocked ... kinda hard to believe. I'll have to sit face to face
to believe for sure, but for now i'll say he beat me. (and he
purportedly is using qwerty on a labtop. (while i'm on a full
Microsoft ergo ekeyboard and dvorak))

Similarly, lots of tech geeking fuckheads brag all day and night about
command line, ratpoison, and shit. I tell you, my computer operating
efficiency beats all of you. Seriously. All we need to test this is to
device some way to score computer operation... switching between apps,
browsers, carried out some tasks like saving images, write notes, ...
though a good standard test would be hard to come by ...

which lead me to another point: emacs operating efficiency. In many of
my emacs discussions on modernization and ways of operation induced by
UI, all tech geekers brag about how emacs way is efficient. I openly
challenge anyone, that:

1. Emacs default ways of operation is not necessary more efficient
(with regards to speed of carrying it out) when compared to modern UI
such as AquaMacs.

2. If you are accustomed with my ergonomic keybinding, i bet that
using it is far more faster than emacs default keybindings.

It is actually not very difficult to verify the above. All we need is
a standard set of text manipulation tasks. Such a task set is not too
difficult to design. For exmalpe, just off the top of my brain now....
you can start with 2 text files, and these two files should become 5
more files, with instructions on which text must go where... etc. The
task set, ideally, will involve most things you do in emacs daily,
such as searching source code, refactoring, getting info from the web
and put them back in somewhere, etc. If one is serious, you could
spend a week and come up with this task set.

In this way, we could actually have a emacs operating tournament with
prize money.  Competitors may require to pay say $10 for registration.
FSF could conceivably host it.

In such a tournament... we can see who can really operate emacs faster
or with better knowledge of using emacs. But this would be boring. It
would be more fun, to see if a team of emacsers using the default
emacs UI vs a team using modern UI such as AquaMacs or emacsW32, or a
team using traditional emacs UI but with my ergonomic keybindings.

... in the past year i've had thought of writing a game in elisp. You
know how you have typing games, where letters or words falls from sky
and you have to type them fast before they hit the ground. In a
similar way, my Emacs Operation game, a window might be split into 2
panes (emacs speak: frames in 2 windows), where one is user area and
the other is the example area, where the example area contains a
example text with instruction on what final result should be like, and
the user types in his pane to create identical text in the example
area, using all emacs commands to carry out the task. This game will
be timped and keep score, based on correctness and speed, and can have
levels, from tasks requiring basic operation such as cut, copy, paste,
paste previous, kill-line, undo, kill-word, kill-word-backward,
isearch, to more advance that are done with say using keyboard macros,
using narrow-to-region, regex replace, isearch, rectangle, registers,
switching mode, switching or listing buffers, deleting buffers, using
dired, nav info, and perhaps at the boss level will require to write
simple elisp command on the spot for the best score.

in the above, the game is a real time based game. That is, the clock
is ticking and your score depends on speed. In another twist, the game
can be made into a flash-card quize or knowledge testing based, where
each question asks you to do something and you have to carried it out
in order to pass, without a time limit. You might be able to ask hint.

-------------

... besides my daydreaming, in reality i dont think i'll ever write
such a game in elisp consider that the task is rather daunting and the
result is comparatively not worthwhile for me. The time spend in elisp
for this i'd rather spend say, to learn coding games with a 3D engine.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄