Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote on Tue, 08 Jun 2004 07:26:45 +0900:
> Galen Boyer <galenboyer@hotpop.com> writes:
>> Of course.  One can start programming immediately with windows based
>> tools.  But, 1-year from that point, the user isn't that much better
>> with the windows-based tool than he was the day he started using it.
>> With Emacs, his skill with the tool has risen dramatically.

> Not to mention that if he's familiar enough with Emacs to be posting
> here, switching wholesale to `windows tools' would probably _lower_ his
> productivity in the short-term.

> The claim that windows tools result in `higher productivity' seem
> pretty specious to me in any case.  What I've seen of windows
> programming environments has been more like a cesspit of mediocrity
> hiding under a pretty face.

Tell me, where is this pretty face (Windows's, not yours ;-)?  Whenever
I've had to use such, I find myself overwhelmed by rows and columns of
menus, toolbars, subtoolbars, labelled mostly with obscure symbols, with
a total complexity exceding that of the pilot's console on a 1960's
passenger airliner.

> -Miles

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[David Kastrup]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote on Tue, 08 Jun 2004 07:26:45 +0900:
> 
> > The claim that windows tools result in `higher productivity' seem
> > pretty specious to me in any case.  What I've seen of windows
> > programming environments has been more like a cesspit of
> > mediocrity hiding under a pretty face.
> 
> Tell me, where is this pretty face (Windows's, not yours ;-)?
> Whenever I've had to use such, I find myself overwhelmed by rows and
> columns of menus, toolbars, subtoolbars, labelled mostly with
> obscure symbols, with a total complexity exceding that of the
> pilot's console on a 1960's passenger airliner.

Welcome to Emacs/XEmacs 21.  While the Mac and Windows users have not
yet seen all the graphic glory you so loudly deplore in released
versions (kind of ironic, isn't it?), the next release will sport
them on _every_ platform, not just X11 that already has them.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Alan Mackenzie]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote on 08 Jun 2004 11:08:00 +0200:
> Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

>> Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote on Tue, 08 Jun 2004 07:26:45 +0900:

>> > The claim that windows tools result in `higher productivity' seem
>> > pretty specious to me in any case.  What I've seen of windows
>> > programming environments has been more like a cesspit of
>> > mediocrity hiding under a pretty face.

>> Tell me, where is this pretty face (Windows's, not yours ;-)?
>> Whenever I've had to use such, I find myself overwhelmed by rows and
>> columns of menus, toolbars, subtoolbars, labelled mostly with obscure
>> symbols, with a total complexity exceding that of the pilot's console
>> on a 1960's passenger airliner.

> Welcome to Emacs/XEmacs 21.  While the Mac and Windows users have not
> yet seen all the graphic glory you so loudly deplore in released
> versions (kind of ironic, isn't it?), the next release will sport them
> on _every_ platform, not just X11 that already has them.

Oh no they won't!  They most certainly won't be appearing on my beloved
Linux tty, where I run Emacs.  (I only ever start Emacs in X for testing
purposes).

But I'm not knocking GUI systems in general.  It's just that things have
got beyond a joke.  When menu systems were invented, you'd typically have
a "2 dimensional" menu structure with a total of 40 or so conceptually
distinct items, which was fine.  I thought my Atari-ST was fabulous.

Now on a typical GUI program, you have a 3 or 4 dimensional structure,
some items of which sprout dialog boxes, themselves with several
"registers" (I think that's what they're called), sometimes even with an
extended tree structure beneath them.  How easy are these to use?  When
one sees a menu item labelled "save as..." or "exit", as in the good old
days, that's fine.  But when the item is labelled "system" what does this
mean?  Or, what about "format"?  Does this mean "please reformat my text"
or "please show me a list of possible formats" or "please create a new
format" or even "please initialize an email buffer, to be sent to my
friend Matt"?  Is it really easier to learn/use such a thing than
learning/using lots of distinct key bindings or command options from a
man page?  I doubt it.

The same applies to toolbars.  If there are nine or ten of them for
commonly used purposes, fine.  But what if there are 40 or 100 of these
cute little pictures littering the screen, for each and every last
possible obscure operation?  I'm looking at StarOffice at the moment.
What does the little house mean?  Might I regret it if I click on it?
There's also a picture looking something like a 4-bladed fan - I'm scared
something might hit this.  ;-(

I know this is drifting off topic.  But I hope Emacs never degenerates
into the sort of ghastly abortion that so often passes for a "user
friendly" program nowadays.

> David Kastrup

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Barak Zalstein]

"Alan Mackenzie" <acm@muc.de> wrote in message news:v064ac.ok.ln@acm.acm...

> Oh no they won't!  They most certainly won't be appearing on my beloved
> Linux tty, where I run Emacs.  (I only ever start Emacs in X for testing
> purposes).
A fully maximized Cygwin window containing Emacs will look as pleasant as a
Linux tty (and skips GUI portability design decisions altoghether).
Unfortunately, enough reasons to run away from this mode: Backspace
mismatched with Control-H (or other wrong keymaps),
Emacs interpretation of xls, doc, pdf, and html is nonexistent or
insufficient.
And of course the occasional application that runs only in GUI.
As much as I would want to see Emacs as "one stop shop" for all computing
needs,
interacting with non-Emacs users means to use a common ground, which
sometimes means
that Emacs compliance is too much of a distraction to follow.
You cannot really say "Emacs is the right tool" when investment in enhanced
productivity is contradicted
by other programming paradigms (anything visual).

Barak

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Barak Zalstein <no_spam@please.not> wrote on Tue, 8 Jun 2004 16:20:14 +0300:
> "Alan Mackenzie" <acm@muc.de> wrote in message news:v064ac.ok.ln@acm.acm...

>> Oh no they won't!  They most certainly won't be appearing on my beloved
>> Linux tty, where I run Emacs.  (I only ever start Emacs in X for testing
>> purposes).

> A fully maximized Cygwin window containing Emacs will look as pleasant as a
> Linux tty (and skips GUI portability design decisions altoghether).

1: A matter of taste;  2: I'd be cynical about that.  :-)

> Unfortunately, enough reasons to run away from this mode: Backspace
> mismatched with Control-H (or other wrong keymaps),

You mean the Cygwin mode?  That kind of contradicts the above.

> Emacs interpretation of xls, doc, pdf, and html is nonexistent or
> insufficient.

Emacs isn't the right tool for these (close/proprietory) formats, no.
Don't know about HTML, though.

> And of course the occasional application that runs only in GUI.

Yep.  That's what X Windows (or whatever) is for.

> As much as I would want to see Emacs as "one stop shop" for all computing
> needs, ....

Not me.  I use other appropriate tools for other tasks - such as vim,
invoked by tin, for writing this article.

> .... interacting with non-Emacs users means to use a common ground,
> which sometimes means that Emacs compliance is too much of a
> distraction to follow.

The common ground is the format of the data.  If we're talking about,
say, text files (program source, etc.), there are no such barriers.  I'm
not sure what you mean by "Emacs compliance" here.  Emacs imposes
virtually no constraints on data formats.  (I can think of precisely one
at the moment, namely the brace/bracket which opens a function body must
be in column zero.  But even this is less true than it was.) 

> You cannot really say "Emacs is the right tool" when investment in
> enhanced productivity is contradicted by other programming paradigms
> (anything visual).

Not sure what you mean here, either.  For its original function, namely
as a programmers' editor, Emacs is unsurpassed in productivity.  It's
pretty slick at other things, too.

Are you suggesting that other programming paradigms (anything "visual")
are a barrier to enhanced productivity?  If so, I agree with you.

> Barak

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Barak Zalstein]

> Are you suggesting that other programming paradigms (anything "visual")
> are a barrier to enhanced productivity?  If so, I agree with you.
Not really.
If you can't interact with the other programming tool from Emacs, because of
a closed non-text data representation,
or a format which is not manipulated well by a text editor (icons, bitmaps
etc.), or simply a certain development tool feature which is reachable only
through a GUI menu, switching back and forth to Emacs or trying to firgure
out how not to drop Emacs from the development cycle _is_ the barrier to
enhanced productivity.
I don't think that this is seeing things from the wrong angle, when merely
keeping up with changing standards and interfaces of default common tools
demands continuous and active effort from an Emacs user .

Barak.

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Barak Zalstein <no_spam@please.not> wrote on Tue, 8 Jun 2004 18:22:51 +0300:
>> Are you suggesting that other programming paradigms (anything "visual")
>> are a barrier to enhanced productivity?  If so, I agree with you.

> Not really.

> If you can't interact with the other programming tool from Emacs, because of
> a closed non-text data representation, or a format which is not manipulated
> well by a text editor (icons, bitmaps etc.), or simply a certain development
> tool feature which is reachable only through a GUI menu,

Sorry, I can scarcely follow what you're saying.  What do you mean by
"interact with the other programming tool from Emacs"?  What does
"interact" mean here?  Quite simply, Emacs doesn't deal with closed
non-text formats.  If you have, e.g., a file.pdf, you use a different
program.  For icons and bitmaps, you'll be using an icon/bitmap program.
The interaction with Emacs comes from specifying the filename to a
program.

Can you give an example of what you mean by a "tool feature ...
reachable only through a GUI menu", which you might want to call from
Emacs?

> .... switching back and forth to Emacs or trying to figure out how not
> to drop Emacs from the development cycle _is_ the barrier to enhanced
> productivity.

I think you've got a particular scenario in mind here.  Would you like to
spell it out in detail?  TIA.

> I don't think that this is seeing things from the wrong angle, when
> merely keeping up with changing standards and interfaces of default
> common tools demands continuous and active effort from an Emacs user .

Emacs is a default common tool.  As for others, keeping up with them
demands effort whether one's an Emacs user or not.

> Barak.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Barak Zalstein]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> I think you've got a particular scenario in mind here.  Would you like to
> spell it out in detail?  TIA.
> 
The specific scenario I have in mind is using Microsoft Visual Studio
for development without giving up on Emacs as the IDE. Earlier posting
about developing using Java SDK implies that Emacs versus a more 
specific development tool is a common problem
across multiple platforms and programming languages.
There are various attemts to "escape", from exporting Makefiles (now you 
can M-x compile) up to http://www.atnetsend.net/computing/VisEmacs/ and 
http://codingstyle.com/articles/using-ms-vcpp-with-gnu-wine.html
but OTOH, the vendor IDE will automatically take care of all little
nuances - class wizards, browse info, graphical resource editors,
source control integration and debugging environment to name few.
I don't think that teaching Emacs to access all those features in a 
MSDEV generated binary is feasible nor productive in the long run,
and if you choose the GNU toolchain instead of Visual in order to make 
Emacs happy, you will suffer from the incomatibility consequense that 
others will not encounter (again, counterproductive).
My current impression from trying development with Emacs and Visual
cuncurrently is that it can be somewhat compared to two mail clients
competing on the same pop3 account (that is you, the developer).
In the end one of them has to go, and it will be the one which is
incompatible.

Barak

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Barak Zalstein <no_spam@no_spam.net> wrote on Wed, 09 Jun 2004 04:01:36 -0400:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> I think you've got a particular scenario in mind here.  Would you like to
>> spell it out in detail?  TIA.

> The specific scenario I have in mind is using Microsoft Visual Studio
> for development without giving up on Emacs as the IDE.

You see Emacs as an _IDE_?  I see Emacs rather as an editor, though one
with the ability usefully to invoke outside tools.  That's quite a
fundamental difference between us.

> Earlier posting about developing using Java SDK implies that Emacs
> versus a more specific development tool is a common problem across
> multiple platforms and programming languages.

OK, I'm following you now.

> There are various attemts to "escape", from exporting Makefiles (now
> you can M-x compile) up to http://www.atnetsend.net/computing/VisEmacs/
> and http://codingstyle.com/articles/using-ms-vcpp-with-gnu-wine.html
> but OTOH, the vendor IDE will automatically take care of all little
> nuances - class wizards, browse info, graphical resource editors,
> source control integration and debugging environment to name few.

And it is just this which bloats that program into (for me at least)
almost unmanageable complexity, as I was saying a post or two ago.

> I don't think that teaching Emacs to access all those features in a
> MSDEV generated binary is feasible nor productive in the long run, and
> if you choose the GNU toolchain instead of Visual in order to make
> Emacs happy, you will suffer from the incomatibility consequence that
> others will not encounter (again, counterproductive).

I think you're not making enough distinction between Emacs (as an editor)
and the GNU toolchain (make, etc.).  I also wouldn't expect using the
G.T. alongside of MS VS to work well (though I'd love to hear from
somebody with experience to the contrary ;-).  But using Emacs (the
editor) in an MS VS project should work without too much problem.

> My current impression from trying development with Emacs and Visual
> cuncurrently is that it can be somewhat compared to two mail clients
> competing on the same pop3 account (that is you, the developer).  In
> the end one of them has to go, and it will be the one which is
> incompatible.

Again, the difference between "Emacs the editor" and "Emacs the IDE".
But how much productivity will you be losing simply because the MS VS
editor isn't very good?  My personal choice here would be to do all
editing, browsing etc., in a separate Emacs (although I believe it's
possible to embed Emacs within MS VC), then use MS VC for building and
testing.  This, by cleanly partitioning the task, appreciably reduces the
combined complexity.

> Barak

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Barak Zalstein]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> 
> I think you're not making enough distinction between Emacs (as an editor)
> and the GNU toolchain (make, etc.).  I also wouldn't expect using the
> G.T. alongside of MS VS to work well (though I'd love to hear from
> somebody with experience to the contrary ;-).  But using Emacs (the
> editor) in an MS VS project should work without too much problem.
> 
Using Emacs as an editor and MS VS as build/test is practically what I 
do now (gdb-mode cannot handle MS VS executables. The MS VS watch
window is nice, but I sure miss breakpoint scripts and yanking variable 
and function names from other buffers while debugging).
Since build/test needs to interact with edit (jumping to error, visiting
the file location where a bug is found) efforts such as VisEmacs
try to address this gap.
Adding source control to the picture, namely Visual Source Safe 
complicates matters even more: The VSS approach is that once you
try editing a non-checked-out file in MS VS, you will need to enter a 
check-out comment before it changes from read-only to writable.
In order to workaround this in Emacs (the editor) you will either
need to check-out the entire repository beforehand (the CVS
approach) or perform file specific check-out using the command line 
version of VSS (until they will cancel that feature as well) through 
Emacs, and repeat for each file you visit and want to modify.
In short you can do all sorts of things in order to keep Emacs as the
editor of your choice, but the gain in productivity is questionable (you 
setup may not work with the next MS VS).

Barak.

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Barak Zalstein]

"Barak Zalstein" <no_spam@no_spam.net> wrote in message
news:40c6618b$1@news.bezeqint.net...
> exporting Makefiles (now you can M-x compile)
Small correction: now you can't.
http://blogs.msdn.com/josh_/archive/2004/05/19.aspx

Barak.

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Miles Bader]

"Barak Zalstein" <no_spam@please.not> writes:
> I don't think that this is seeing things from the wrong angle, when merely
> keeping up with changing standards and interfaces of default common tools
> demands continuous and active effort from an Emacs user .

This is true to an extent, but note that often modern GUI tools are _so_
bad outside their narrow focus that one could be more productive using
something like emacs, _despite_ the incompatibility.

-Miles
-- 
`To alcohol!  The cause of, and solution to,
 all of life's problems' --Homer J. Simpson

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Galen Boyer]

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004, miles@gnu.org wrote:

> What I've seen of windows programming environments has been
> more like a cesspit of mediocrity hiding under a pretty face.

There are only a few windows tools I actually use and here is
when I actually use them.

- Excel:  It works nicely, just wish I could narrow, occur, undo,
  ...

- Outlook: Cause the rest of the world uses it, and more
  importantly, all of the professional calendar stuff is there.

- Notepad: To print an Emacs document, cause, well I've just
  never taken the time.

- Erwin:  Cause, well, this is a large part of my profession.

- CommandPrompt: Cause, sometimes I want to make sure Emacs isn't
  getting in the way.  The other thing is the ping output doesn't
  show up from an Emacs comint buffer.  But those are the only
  two reasons I might have one of these open.

- WindowsExplorer: Cause deleting entire directories is easier
  from it.  Plus, I rarely do that operation, so I don't find it
  all that cumbersome.  But, like a good keyboard enthusiast, I
  use Windows-e and then the arrow keys.  :-)

- Any windows browser, cause, they are already braindead
  operations as well as the fact that none of my projects I'm
  working on are on the hook for supporting the w3 interface.
  Plus, its nice and pretty with pictures out of the box.  Emacs
  takes hours to get it nice...

I think there are few more.  But, basically, I have any where
from 1 to 5 different Emacs sessions going, and everyonce in
awhile, I use some windows only tool.

-- 
Galen Boyer

Re: Time to throw away my LOVE - Emacs ?

[Marco Parrone]

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Galen Boyer on 8 Jun 2004 08:54:14 -0500 writes:

> - WindowsExplorer: Cause deleting entire directories is easier
>   from it.  Plus, I rarely do that operation, so I don't find it
>   all that cumbersome.  But, like a good keyboard enthusiast, I
>   use Windows-e and then the arrow keys.  :-)

This works for me on GNU/Linux, it may work with `rm' from CygWin (or
perhaps MSYS (MINGW)?), to delete `PATH/DIRNAME':

  C-x d PATH RET
  C-s DIRNAME RET      ; or move the pointer on the directory by other ways
  ! rm -rf RET         ; pay attention, especially when you have marked files

or

  M-! rm -rf PATH/DIRNAME RET

No silly trash and possibility to wipe out things too (for example,
replacing `rm' with `wipe' in the command lines above, if you have the
`wipe' program).

-- 
Marco Parrone <marc0@autistici.org> [0x45070AD6]

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