Re: beginner questions

[JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> me get down to work. Otherwise, not yet being familiar with emacs,
>> I have to look up every second or two to see what it's doing,
>> to make sure I'm not doing something it's already done for me, etc.
> 
> Emacs generally tries to make it so that what you see is all there is
> to see.  So while it may perform extra edits for you, it should always
> be immediately visible on screen.  IOW as long as you look at your
> screen, you should immediately see when something's going on.

Well, that sounds to me somewhat like, "...as long as you
look out your windshield, you should see that Mack truck
about to crash into you at 100kph [55mph]." Seriously, though,
in my personal experience (emphasize personal, I'm just talking
about me), I more often than not have to undo "extra edits it
may perform for you". And maybe even worse, I have to stop
and think about it while I'm trying to concentrate on what I'm
actually working on.

> Also, usually by default Emacs tries not to perform changes you haven't
> explicitly asked for.  This is not always the case (e.g. the
> auto-indentation of after inserting ; in C mode), but these exceptions
> so they should be reasonably rare.
> 
> IOW, I recommend you don't try to force fundamental-mode everywhere, but
> instead to use Emacs in its vanilla form and then to ask how to disable
> specifically those things that bother you.

As above, my experience isn't "reasonably rare", and my preference is
therefore opposite -- disable everything, and then enable those things
that I like. Granted, I won't immediately be aware of things I may like
if they're disaabled to begin with, but I'll eventually stumble across them.

>> different than yours. I absolutely hate colors,
>   (global-font-lock-mode -1)
>> parentheses matching,
>   (setq blink-matching-paren nil)
> 
Thanks for the answers, Stefan.

>> indenting.
> This normally only happens when you explicitly ask for it by hitting TAB.
> The exceptions will depend on the major-mode in use, so when you bump
> into a problematic case, post it here (and/or do a M-x report-emacs-bug
> pointing out that this major-mode should obey electric-indent-mode).
> 
>>  Speaking of which, I hadn't really exercised that fundamental-mode
>> properly when I remarked in preceding post that it worked fine.
>> It stops "parentheses" matching <stuff>, which is what I'd noticed
>> since I'm currently writing some html (but mostly write C nowadays).
>> But it still matches (stuff) and [stuff] and {stuff}. Any way to
>> turn that off? Thanks.
> 
> In most cases I've seen (tho not all), beginners misunderstand the
> default paren-matching and have the impression they have to wait for
> "the cursor to come back".  Once they discover that they do *not* have
> to wait (IOW the cursor comes back as soon as they type something), they
> tend to like it (it's really designed to be "as unintrusive as we
> could").
>
> But if you still dislike it, just add
>   (setq blink-matching-paren nil)
> in your ~/.emacs file.
> 
>> The only colors I like are black fg on white bg -- for >>everything<<.
> Same for me.  So, I use
>   M-x customize-face RET font-lock-<yourchoicehere>-face RET
> to change those nasty default colors and replace them with
> italics/bold/grey. Stefan
Thanks again,
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )