The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Twisted]

On Jun 26, 10:37 am, Bjorn Borud <borud-n... at borud.no> wrote:
> ...and of course, in addition you have access to history so you can
> easily find previous parameters and edit them.  this makes it very
> efficient when you need to fiddle about in deep directory trees in a
> way no GUI can yet offer.
>
> ...and then there's bookmarking, which is very good for keeping a set
> of files (and locations) handy for quick access.

Good thing it has these. Bookmarking is quite natural and is THE way
in GUIs to cope with deep directory structures. Bookmarking in a GUI
is simple: you just open file-browser windows and park them in oft-
visited places, to flip to whenever needed. Multitasking window
systems are neat that way. Current versions of Windoze Explorer have a
history and back and forward navigation buttons reminiscent of a Web
browser, too.

None of them turn into as big a PITA when lots of files have a
lengthy, identical prefix either, which is a fairly common situation.
That only causes difficulty at all when some column or window is sized
too narrowly to show parts of the name past the prefix, forcing
scrolling. Resizing it is then easy, thanks to the GUI, so unless the
prefix is wide enough to cross the entire screen even if you set the
font size down to 3... contrast that with tab completion, where to
disambiguate you'll have to type the entire prefix and then part of
the rest, THEN hit tab. If the prefix is long, you might be saving 3
keystrokes reducing 47 to 44, a gain in productivity of about 7%, a
figure I'm sure you'll agree is somewhat underwhelming. Of course with
a GUI it's spot-the-right-file-and-click, and just as fast whether the
prefix is 4 characters long or 40.