From: Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com>
To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: Re: HOWTO: Cowtow to old farts
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:09:45 -0700 (PDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <f01d314e-8595-4777-b6dc-145bd72b901e@d8g2000yqf.googlegroups.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: slrni2ja96.6pq.nospam-abuse@powdermilk.math.berkeley.edu
for those who may not know, Ilya Zakharevich is the guy to perl's
regex engine, and author of cperl-mode. (8.1 k non-comment lines.),
among tens of other perl modules.
On Jun 29, 1:04 am, Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-ab...@ilyaz.org> wrote:
> Re: HOWTO: Cowtow to old farts
> ...
> So, what do you think?
I think you are joking. lol.
am curious, what are your emacs configs? are they public somewhere? I
didn't seem to see it in your perl home page. Thanks in advance.
Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/
☄
On Jun 29, 1:04 am, Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-ab...@ilyaz.org> wrote:
> On 2010-06-10, Evans Winner <tho...@unm.edu> wrote:
>
> > In my opinion, the question should never be what new users
> > of Emacs want. What new users want is an editor that is 5%
> > better than notepad.exe because that is per-force the limit
> > of their imagination. They generally do no know 1% of what
> > Emacs can do, so are not in a position to intelligently
> > decide what the defaults should be. They /should/ want to
> > rely on experienced users for that, and they should be
> > willing to spend the extra tiny bit of effort up-front to
> > learn the reasoning behind it. If they aren't, then Emacs
> > isn't for them. Let them go.
>
> Do not think you would find many people agreeing with you. Anyway:
>
> =======================================================
>
> I applaud the stand of emacs developers in this thread: facing with
> (extremely rude, unsubstantiated and, IMO, just plain stupid) attacks from
> a handful of self-righteous ... - Well, there is no need to stack epithets
> here, if you read this, you probably have read the other 176 messages in
> this thread, and had a possibility to see what the attackers consider to be
> "arguments".
>
> Anyway, I'm really proud of how the developers behaved in this situation -
> and how they understand their responsibilities in maintaining Emacs. Myself,
> I never used Emacs23, so cannot comment on the particular feature in question;
> however, I cannot skip commenting on the general question of maintainance of
> Emacs defaults. (In 1/2 of what follows, there is going to be nothing new
> w.r.t. my other runts on this topic; skip to '----' if you cannot stand this
> habit of mine.)
>
> For several decades, Emacs was practically unusable as a text editor AS
> SHIPPED. Mostly, this was due to the old-guard developers having no clue
> in questions of UI design. The situation started to change about 10 years
> ago (and now I expect I may be able to remove more than half of those
> MEGABYTES of customizations I needed to make Emacs bearable for me - and many
> people using my customizations). I attribute it to inflow of new blood the
> camp of developers - and, as I said, I'm proud of them having great
> contributions to this thread.
>
> Being "unusable-as-shipped" makes the question of preserving the old defaults
> moot - the ONLY way ahead is to change the defaults as quick as possible.
> This would make the `hidden wonders' of Emacs accessible to most of the users.
>
> In my experience (and let me stress that this thread proves me wrong - see
> below), Emacs users come in two large categories: the silent majority (>70%,
> in my estimates): the people who operate in n00b's mode (as in "how do I edit
> .emacs if it is not there?" [*] ;-): they know better use of their brains
> than learning hundreds of keyboard command, learning how to program Emacs,
> and/or what is the name of configuration file of Emacs.
>
> (In my experience, most users also share another feature: most of them are
> not interested in "typing as quick as they think". They are more
> interested in following the "when you say what you think, think what you
> say" maxim. Quality [and prudence] over speed... Few of they would be
> interested in "minimizing leaving home row keys".)
>
> The other category consists of us, old guard old farts, who consider it an
> investement of time to read the NEWS file (at least when things break ;-),
> who are visible on c.e.emacs, are not intimidated by running `F1 k' if things
> are not working as we expect, and for whom it is absolutely not a nuisance
> to insert a line into .emacs once in several years.
>
> Facing these two categories, the policy is obvious: the default should cater
> to those who won't be able to change them: newbies and eternal-newbies.
> And for the old farts, there should be a clear pathway to navigate to HOWTO
> on undoing these changes. (And: this thread contained many suggestions how
> to make this navigation easier.)
>
> ---- And now the new part ----
>
> However, as this thread shows, there is another category which was
> overlooked in my list (in my 15 years on this newsgroup, I do not recollect
> hearing from it before): "hapless" old farts - those who have a pretty good
> idea how Emacs works, but do not know how to find their way out of their
> pants^H^H^H^Hroblems.
>
> In this thread, their rudeness and obvious haplessness in the skill of
> persuation hides an important consideration: it is POSSIBLE AND EASY to cater
> to their needs as well. And if it is possible and easy, I think ti is our
> obligation to implement it.
>
> The solution may be as easy as having one function and one variable. Use them
> by replacing the defaults value by
>
> (choose-by-version
> emacs-principal-UI-freeze
> nil
> "23.2" t
> "21.1" 'skip)
>
> with arguments being VERSION DEFAULT_VAL VERSION1 VALUE1 VERSION2 VALUE2 ....
> One may require VERSIONn's going in decreasing order, so nil, t, 'skip
> would be the "current default", "previous default", "default before this" etc.
>
> Even if there is only a handful of people who would actually want to freeze
> the "principal parts" of UI, such a trick may have a major role. Just a
> POSSIBILITY to freeze allows one much more freedom in CHANGING the defaults.
> And I expect that there may be many more useful ways to make defaults yet more
> user-friendly than they are now.
>
> So, what do you think?
> Ilya
>
> [*] BTW: why not have an option "Edit configuration file" in the Help menu?
> Or maybe it is already there? Not here, in 21.4...
>
> One may even insert some meaningful header there if the file is
> not present (sp?):
>
> ;;; This file is loaded by Emacs before-this/after-that;
> ;;; it should contain Emacs-Lisp code customizing Emacs to your taste.
> ;;; To debug problems in this file, one may skip loading it
> ;;; by giving option -q to emacs. Alternatively, uncomment
> ;;; the following line (or give --debug-init option to Emacs):
> ; (....)
> ;;; For further details, Choose XYZT from Emacs menu, or type ....
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2010-06-29 11:09 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 115+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <alpine.OSX.2.00.1006031053170.77397@hsinghsing.panda.com>
[not found] ` <hu925r$1b$1@north.jnrs.ja.net>
[not found] ` <alpine.OSX.2.00.1006031431510.77397@hsinghsing.panda.com>
2010-06-04 7:59 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
[not found] ` <87pr07qjio.fsf@thinkpad.tsdh.de>
2010-06-04 11:24 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-04 12:49 ` line-move-visual Tassilo Horn
2010-06-09 19:51 ` line-move-visual Joseph Brenner
2010-06-09 20:22 ` line-move-visual Brendan Halpin
2010-06-10 1:23 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
[not found] ` <hualdf$eln$1@north.jnrs.ja.net>
2010-06-04 13:00 ` line-move-visual Tassilo Horn
2010-06-04 14:51 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
2010-06-04 20:53 ` line-move-visual Tassilo Horn
2010-06-09 19:42 ` proposed keyboard-macro to record to elisp (was Re: line-move-visual) Joseph Brenner
2010-06-09 22:42 ` LanX
[not found] ` <871vcmhq79.fsf@wivenhoe.ul.ie>
[not found] ` <hub2ss$is4$1@north.jnrs.ja.net>
2010-06-04 14:45 ` line-move-visual Brendan Halpin
2010-06-04 17:49 ` line-move-visual Xah Lee
2010-06-04 18:18 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
2010-06-04 19:19 ` line-move-visual Xah Lee
[not found] ` <alpine.OSX.2.00.1006041829210.77397@hsinghsing.panda.com>
[not found] ` <089883ee-0a63-4cb4-a0ec-d2fe4e71cc03@y18g2000prn.googlegroups.com>
2010-06-06 9:53 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-06 9:39 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
[not found] ` <hug5rv$6d2$1@north.jnrs.ja.net>
2010-06-06 15:21 ` line-move-visual Tassilo Horn
2010-06-07 8:19 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
[not found] ` <m2fx0z46wj.fsf@gmail.com>
2010-06-07 16:20 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
2010-06-06 15:43 ` line-move-visual Alain Ketterlin
[not found] ` <87wrucccl3.fsf_-_@marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de>
2010-06-07 6:18 ` Wrong use of format=flowed antidote Uday S Reddy
2010-06-07 21:30 ` line-move-visual Joost Kremers
2010-06-06 18:17 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
[not found] ` <4C0C466E.3000803@thadlabs.com>
2010-06-07 2:53 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
2010-06-07 8:46 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-07 16:23 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
2010-06-09 20:23 ` line-move-visual Joseph Brenner
2010-06-07 8:39 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-10 10:12 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-10 13:43 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
2010-06-10 15:17 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-10 19:53 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
2010-06-10 15:44 ` line-move-visual despen
2010-06-10 22:02 ` line-move-visual Tassilo Horn
2010-06-10 23:56 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-10 22:48 ` line-move-visual Evans Winner
[not found] ` <slrni2ja96.6pq.nospam-abuse@powdermilk.math.berkeley.edu>
2010-06-29 11:09 ` Xah Lee [this message]
2010-06-10 16:57 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
2010-06-10 18:38 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-11 23:56 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
2010-06-12 0:17 ` line-move-visual Wojciech Meyer
2010-06-13 17:23 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
2010-06-13 20:56 ` line-move-visual Alan Mackenzie
2010-06-14 0:42 ` line-move-visual Jim Diamond
2010-06-14 10:49 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-14 17:16 ` line-move-visual Alan Mackenzie
2010-06-14 17:34 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-15 9:26 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-15 13:49 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
[not found] ` <87sk4n3ocs.fsf@rapttech.com.au>
2010-06-16 14:43 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
[not found] ` <m2k4q18od5.fsf@softwarematters.org>
[not found] ` <jwvaaqxbcca.fsf-monnier+gnu.emacs.help@gnu.org>
2010-06-15 6:54 ` line-move-visual Pascal J. Bourguignon
2010-06-15 8:42 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-15 9:30 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
2010-06-15 9:38 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-15 13:45 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
2010-06-15 13:57 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
[not found] ` <jwvbpbb6oyk.fsf-monnier+gnu.emacs.help@gnu.org>
2010-06-16 18:04 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
[not found] ` <hv8gvf$98o$1@north.jnrs.ja.net>
[not found] ` <hv8iog$313e$1@colin2.muc.de>
2010-06-15 19:37 ` line-move-visual Leo
[not found] ` <871vc8dpga.fsf@imladris.arda>
2010-06-16 12:37 ` Emacs language Leo
2010-06-17 8:00 ` Teemu Likonen
2010-06-15 21:04 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-16 15:33 ` line-move-visual Alan Mackenzie
2010-06-17 8:51 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-16 14:33 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
[not found] ` <db13ae67-9d9a-4556-9a7c-8f86de63011f@b4g2000pra.googlegroups.com>
2010-07-19 22:41 ` minor mode on/off/toggle with t/nil question Stefan Monnier
2010-06-15 16:51 ` line-move-visual Alan Mackenzie
2010-06-16 12:43 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
2010-06-15 19:17 ` line-move-visual Xah Lee
2010-06-16 14:49 ` espresso-mode (was: line-move-visual) Stefan Monnier
[not found] ` <4C17FE36.30102@thadlabs.com>
2010-06-15 22:45 ` line-move-visual Xah Lee
2010-06-15 23:31 ` line-move-visual Thad Floryan
2010-06-16 3:30 ` line-move-visual Evans Winner
2010-06-16 16:14 ` line-move-visual Xah Lee
2010-06-16 23:23 ` line-move-visual Chris F.A. Johnson
[not found] ` <b1e84c4a-e74e-4ace-9b0f-a00b370eb61d@q39g2000prh.googlegroups.com>
2010-06-16 23:45 ` Keyboard Hardware's Influence on Keyboard Shortcut Design Xah Lee
2010-06-16 14:52 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
[not found] ` <87r5k6sqg2.fsf@unm.edu>
2010-06-17 2:25 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
2010-06-17 3:51 ` line-move-visual Chris F.A. Johnson
2010-06-17 9:03 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-20 18:42 ` line-move-visual B. T. Raven
2010-06-20 17:08 ` line-move-visual B. T. Raven
2010-06-12 4:18 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-12 4:37 ` line-move-visual Evans Winner
2010-06-12 8:30 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
2010-06-12 8:40 ` line-move-visual Evans Winner
2010-06-12 9:30 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-12 12:30 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-12 20:09 ` line-move-visual Joseph Brenner
2010-06-13 1:41 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-13 10:22 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-13 10:51 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
2010-06-13 11:32 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-14 0:46 ` line-move-visual Tim X
[not found] ` <hv4nkd$quq$1@north.jnrs.ja.net>
2010-06-15 9:20 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-15 11:29 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-16 9:29 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-14 4:48 ` line-move-visual Tim X
[not found] ` <m2iq5nw4pj.fsf@gmail.com>
[not found] ` <hv2htd$4li$1@north.jnrs.ja.net>
[not found] ` <m239wravxb.fsf@gmail.com>
2010-06-16 2:11 ` line-move-visual Joseph Brenner
2010-06-16 6:46 ` line-move-visual Helmut Eller
2010-06-13 10:36 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
2010-06-16 2:19 ` line-move-visual Joseph Brenner
[not found] ` <huvsd5$8pm$1@north.jnrs.ja.net>
2010-06-12 12:25 ` line-move-visual Tim X
2010-06-12 20:17 ` line-move-visual Joseph Brenner
2010-06-10 19:57 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
2010-06-13 12:46 ` line-move-visual Uday S Reddy
2010-06-09 21:38 ` line-move-visual Joseph Brenner
[not found] ` <slrni10ga0.t64.Jim.Diamond@jdiamond-nb.acadiau.ca>
2010-06-10 16:15 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
2010-06-04 17:52 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
2010-06-04 18:28 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
[not found] ` <alpine.OSX.2.00.1006041808540.77397@hsinghsing.panda.com>
[not found] ` <878w6truxc.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
2010-06-06 2:25 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
[not found] ` <87typc9dt8.fsf@kzsu.stanford.edu>
[not found] ` <alpine.OSX.2.00.1006091815150.93771@hsinghsing.panda.com>
2010-06-10 7:12 ` line-move-visual David Kastrup
2010-06-04 21:16 ` line-move-visual Stefan Monnier
2010-06-05 1:29 ` line-move-visual Mark Crispin
2010-06-04 13:20 ` line-move-visual sable
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