The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Falcolas]

On Jun 21, 10:09 am, Robert Uhl <eadmun... at NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote:
> You're quite right.  Windows/Mac user interfaces are so clunky that they
> massively hamper productivity.  Emacs, OTOH, enables it.  For example,
> C-s is search forward; C-r is search backward ('reverse'); C-M-s is
> search forward for a regular expression; C-M-r is search backward for a
> regular expression.  A Windows or Mac editor would have C-s for save,
> and that's it.  It might have C-f for find, but it'd pop up a dialogue
> instead of offering an interactive search, causing a mental context
> switch.  Searching would interrupt one's flow of thought rather than
> being part of it.

Being a primarily windows user, I have to question your assertion that
using ctrl-f for find causes a "mental context switch". For me, in 90%
of the windows applications, finding something is as simple as ctrl-f,
the phrase, hit enter. Not terribly different from your set of
commands. The biggest difference is that if I need to use a Find
feature I might not often use, I have a visual interface to all the
related search functions. On the other hand, a terminal program would
necessitate a memory search at best, or a trip to the help pages at
worst.

The best part of my windows knowledge is that it's transferable to
most (all?) of the applications I work with. Find is usually ctrl-f.
Undo is ctrl-z. Save is ctrl-s, yadda yadda. Such knowledge is rarely
transferable from terminal programs in my experience -- what may be
true for one program (emacs) is wildly different in another program
(vi), and useless in yet another (pico).

On the other hand, I can move from notepad to Word to Open Office to
Notepad++, based on the availability at the terminal I'm on, with
little difficulty.

For the record, I use VIM when in terminals. Emacs isn't available on
our *nix boxes.