Re: beginner questions

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@shellworld.net>]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2013, JohnF wrote:

> Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> > JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:
> > 
> >> Can't use my favorite editor any more (long story, don't ask:),
> >> and decided to go with emacs. Of course, there are zillions of
> >> tutorials, etc, but most are almost-infinitely wordy, whereas
> >> I'm comfortable with editors and basically want a cheat sheet.
> >> But even they're usually too long, with lots of arcane commands
> >> that I'm sure I'll eventually want to know, but not while I'm
> >> still trying to remember how to cut-and-paste.
> >>   So I started making my own  forkosh.com/emacs.txt  but am
> >> having difficulty zeroing in on some info.
> >>   Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
> >> no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
> >> <h2>stuff</h2> underlined. 
> 
> > M-x fundamental-mode RET
> >    This gives you the basic editor features and nothing more.
> > M-x text-mode RET
> >    is designed to edit natural language texts (paragraphs, lines,
> > words, characters).  It may not be useful to edit code, which is
> > structured quite differently from natural language text.
> 
> Thanks, Pascal, that's perfect. Don't know how I missed it
> during maybe ~5 minutes trying various google queries.
> 
> >> And really annoying, I don't want
> >> the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
> >> Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
> >> I just want a dumb editor in the sense that it shouldn't think
> >> it knows >>anything<< about the language/syntax I'm writing in,
> >> regardless of filename extension. It should just see a stream
> >> of uninterpreted characters, unless it sees C- or M- (or
> >> something with special emacs significance).
> >
> > Yep, fundamental-mode will give you that.
> Yep, works great.
> 
> >> And various and sundry minor questions, e.g., what exactly
> >> is the undo scope of C-/ and how do you just undo "last keystroke",
> >> and no more than that (if last keystroke was a C-y then, okay,
> >> undo the entire yank)?
> > 
> > It seems to me, history coalesce input, so that undo can't undo text
> > entry character by character, (unless you separate each character by
> > some other command, such as cursor move).  Other than that, it seems to
> > me that undo works like that, undoing one command at a time.
> 
> No big problem, I don't suppose. I guess I'll get used to it.
> Just caused me some minor inconvenience when it behaved
> unexpectedly (unexpected to me, that is) and undid lots more
> than I'd intended. I'm just being more careful now, until
> I comfortably know what to actually expect.
> 
> >> Finally, have I missed some tutorial/cheat-sheet-type info designed
> >> for my kind of needs -- already familiar with various languages
> >> and editors, and just wants to get down to work using emacs?
> >> Just wants the 100 or so most used commands "telegraphed", without
> >> more extra words than necessary? Thanks,
> > 
> > http://cs.iupui.edu/~kweimer/EmacsCheatSheet.pdf
> > seems to be a nice and short cheat sheet.
> 
> Thanks, again, Pascal. That's perfect, too. Just what I wanted,
> and had also failed to find (neither that nor anything close to it)
> during google searches.
> 
> > Now of course, the big win of emacs, is when you activate those modes
> > that provide automatic features specific to the kind of document you're
> > editing and its syntax. So fundamental-mode is not used often. But I
> > agree that it may help for newbies, to start with it, and add layers and
> > tools later.
> 
> Yeah, I peeked at your informatimago.com homepage, and saw all
> your gpl'ed emacs tools. The asm7090 seemed especially unusual.
> I started with keypunches (and that's 026's), and ran stuff
> on the 7040 in CCNY's EE dept a long (long,...) time ago.
> But the creation date on your pjb-asm7090.el is 2005-06-04.
> Somebody still emulating that somewhere?
> 
Control+g may be useful here.

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jude <jdashiel@shellworld.net>