The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Chris Barts]

blmblm at myrealbox.com <blmblm at myrealbox.com> wrote on Monday 25 June 2007
15:43 in comp.emacs <5ear80F36ga72U3 at mid.individual.net>:

> 
> Eclipse has something that generates "import" statements with
> a few keystrokes, and for me that's almost in the "killer app
> [feature]" class.  

This is a sign of a weak programming language, in my eyes: If you need
keystroke macros to enter boilerplate, you REALLY need a language that
allows you to package commonly-used idioms into macros. (See Common Lisp,
Scheme, Emacs Lisp, and, indeed, even Dylan. Python and Ruby almost solve
the same problem by providing a richer set of primitives, but they aren't
extensible.)

> (Why do I strongly suspect that with the 
> right plug-ins emacs can do this too?  :-)   That would send
> me searching for the Web site where vim macros are collected.)
> 

Inserting literal text in Emacs using keystroke macros is trivial. Inserting
more changeable boilerplate is a job for Emacs Lisp.

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