Re: Assignment of misc packages for emacs

[Alex Schroeder <alex@emacswiki.org>]

storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:

>>     - - kmacro.el [medium]

Reading the description, it seems like an easier user interface.
Perhaps the keys need to be changed, but having the autoincrement
stuff available that easily would help a lot of non-elisp users.

Other people could probably do this by using a keyboardmarco and then
calling query-replace-regexp-eval.  For newbies, Kim's UI seems
better.

>>     - - ido.el [large]

I tried it, and did not like it.  It is mentioned a lot on newsgroups
and #emacs, however, thus I assume that a lot of people use it.

>>     - - match.el [large]

Yes, a better user interface to grep and friends is needed.  The best
I usually recommend to newbies is dired, include subdirectories into
the buffer, and then use dired-do-query-replace-regexp.  Since the
recursion is not automatic, this involves too many steps.  Kim's UI
seems better.  Plus he seems to have better navigation (which we might
want to add to plain grep and compile buffers anyway).

>>     - - find-char.el [small]

Hm, I never zap to characters, thus in those rare cases when I need to
do it, I just use isearch.  A bit more keys, but who cares...  Vi
lovers can use viper, IMHO.  :)

>>     - - begendol.el [small]

Seems like an interesting addition.  I would prefer to try it first,
though.

>>     - - minimenu.el [small]

I think this is only usefull for elisp programmers, and those people
might want to add for a better user interface.  Personally, I got used
to these multi-letter minimenus in query-replace, but I don't really
"like" them.  It would be better to make such things available via
menus, or completion, IMHO.  The example cited by Kim is good, I
guess, but what newbies would like is some functionality like
"favorite files" (a better interface to bookmarks) or "recent
documents" (make recentf the default), I think.  Or perhaps even an
augmented bookmark interface that allows you to "bookmark" keyboard
macros.  Thus you could "bookmark" C-x C-f ~/.emacs as well as M-x
gnus-no-server.

>>     - - colordif.el [small]

VC diff output is already colored in my Emacs.  Plain diff is not,
however.  Thus I think that the mechanism used for VC diff should be
used for plain diff as well.  Perhaps colordif does exactly that, but
introducing new diff faces, for example, would be confusing.

>>     - - copy-above.el [small]

I don't see a need for that, I rarely do similar task using kill/yank.
Thus assume this is not too important.



The most important part is, I believe, the UI improvements to some of
the features Emacs already provides.

Alex.
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