Re: current directory

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

vb <help-gnu-emacs@vsbe.com> writes:

> On Saturday 21 October 2006 11:38, don provan wrote:
>
>> Emacs is a development system, so most people use it to look at or
>> modify many files in any given session. (Some people go so far as
>> to use a single emacs sessions as their *entire user environment*
>> and don't do *anything* outside emacs!)
>
> And I feel sorry for these people :-)

Well, a lot of people feel sorry for me when they see me going
everywhere by bicycle when I would have the option to work two hours
longer a day in order to afford a car that saves me something like 30
minutes of driving so that I can get faster to a gym in the evening in
order to get the exercise I am missing throughout the day.

Modern lifestyle is completely wacko.  And modern desktops feel like a
microcosmos of modern life.

Take something like a battery applet in a taskbar.  It does not cost
more than a few megabytes of memory, talks through Corba methods and
other smart stuff to the taskbar and probably takes just some
expendible amount of CPU time.  The equivalent applet in Emacs takes a
few _kilo_ bytes of memory (if at all) and no noticeable CPU impact.

People talk about the "bloat" of Emacs.  When I work with a typical
Emacs session (I am lazy and keep sessions over logouts), Emacs has
probably something like 30-40MB memory impact when used with AUCTeX,
preview-latex, editing several directories, CVS support etc etc.  Now
starting a simple, "unbloated" KDE TeX environment like Kate(?) will
fire up 90MBs of libraries, demons and whatnots before I even load a
single file.

>> In that situation, it would be *insane* to insist that the user
>> keep in mind some arbitrary "current directory" based on how emacs
>> was invoked the very first time when there's a very specific and
>> obvious directory location staring the user in the face.
>>
>
> no, it would not be insane at all. All other editors but emacs I am
> used to maintain a notion of "current directory" and allow the user
> to change this current directory explicitly.

"All others" is not synonymous with "sane" in my book.

> Don, all being said, I really appreciate your effort and
> suggestions, I sure don't want to discourage anyone from using
> emacs, I just want you hard core emacs guys recognize that there is
> life outside emacs :-)

Oh, sure, nobody denies that.  It just sucks in comparison.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum