Re: Open Hypspec with w3m

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

>> On Sun, Jan 30 2011, Tim X wrote:
>> > Yes. A similar situation. I came from vi to emacs (I started with old
>> > Unix systems long before Linux). However, due to some bad luck, I lost
>> > my sight and at the time (mid 90s) the only good interface on Linux
>> > for blind users was emacs and an extension package called emacspeak,
>> > which uses defadvice a lot to add speech support. The learning curve
>> > was very steep at first and emacs seemed very alien compared to the
>> > vi. However now I am very much at home with it. Last year, after over
>> > 15 years, I was lucky enough to get a considerable amount of sigh
>> > back,
>
> OOO Thats very good to hear!

Sometimes I'm a fool! The main reason I mentioned my sight issue was to
mention what an interesting package emacspeak is. This is one package
whih shows what you can do with emacs and a little imagination.
Essentially, it adds spoken feedback to everything you do in emacs. As
you type, letters are spelt out and spoken, lines are spoken and you can
get the whole screen spoken. In addition to that, it has something
unique in the adaptive technology field - voice lock. This is like
font-lock, except rather than using colours, it uses different voices
and voice pitch. So, when doing something like programming, keywords,
constants comments, strings etc are all spoken in a different voice.
Sound icons are used to indicate various operations, such as saving a
file or opening an email message which also contains atachments etc. 

Nearly all of this is made possible through the use of defadvice and
lots of supporting helper functions. It shows that what you can do with
emacs is largely down to your imagination as all the power is there. 

>
> On Feb 1, 9:15 am, Jason Earl <je...@notengoamigos.org> wrote:
>> I have high hopes that with the inclusion of CEDET that Emacs can start
>> making progress on the IDE front.  I basically feel the same way about
>> Emacs as you do.  I've used Eclipse and Netbeans, and I did not like
>> them, even for Java development.  Sure, there were some things that they
>> did *much* better than Emacs, but mostly they just seemed to get in the
>> way.
>>
>> I've played a bit with CEDET's EDE, however, and it was definitely cool
>> to build Autoconf projects from Emacs.  Eventually I really would like
>> to be able to help move things forward.
>
> It seems to me that cooperativeness helps open source projects more
> than competitiveness.
> In particular if emacs had something like eclim it would be the best
> of all worlds.
> The only downside would be memory footprint.  Who cares about that
> anyway nowadays especially if we have customizability, autoloading etc

There are a few things I'd like to see improved with emacs. I wished it
had multi-threading for example. While elisp is great for the main tasks
it does, I'd also love a more sophisticated/powerful language. While I'm
doubtful it will ever happen, it would be interesting to have an emacs
that used something like guile or even common lisp as its underlying
extension language. This has been talked about for years, but I'm not
sure if we will ever get there. I'm not even sure if the way to go would
be to convert emacs to something like guile or start a whole new system
that was able to benefit from the experience of Emacs and maybe avoid
some of the mistakes or poorer design decisions . This is not to say that
I'm critical of the work which has and is being done - there seem to be
very few decisions that have been poor choices. For the years I've been
using emacs, I think on the whole, the emacs development and maintenance
team have done an excellent job and I would not want my comments to seem
critical of this. What I'm referring to is the ability to make better
choices now we have the benefit of more experience and greater
udnerstanding of the issues. In fact, it seems to me that there has been
some reinvigoration with respect to emacs development over the last few
years and things do appear brighter than they have at times in the past. 

For now, I'm pleased we have what we have and am thankful for that.

Tim


 
-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au