The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Rustom Mody]

On 6/28/07, Andreas Eder <andreas_eder at gmx.net> wrote:

>     Twisted> In the other corner, we have just about every Unix application ever
>     Twisted> developed. When a user needs help, they may do such things as manually
>     Twisted> explore the directories where the application was installed
>     Twisted> (equivalent to rooting around in C:\Program Files\Appname for .hlp
>     Twisted> files, because F1 didn't work and there was no "help" menu, if such a
>     Twisted> thing ever happened on Windoze).
>
> Ever heard of man pages? and info?
Hi Andreas:

Yeah thats the problem.... there's the 40 year old man and the 20 year
old info and then yelp and random stuff in /usr/doc and of course then
theres google and... and...

So its not that theres too little info but too much and unnecessarily
similar and inconsistent.

Twisted may not know what he's talking about but Ive used Unix (xenix)
starting 1986 and emacs from '93 so I can say that the state of linux
is not all that great.

Apart from the help-itis mentioned above there are:
-- distro-itis -- its almost as difficult to move from debian/ubuntu
to redhat I as moving to windows
-- script-itis -- why must we have perl and python and ruby (and tcl
and lua and...)
-- emacs-itis -- Ive mostly only used gnu-emacs but at least once I
had to use xemacs for running APL.

Sorry... I dont want to start another flame-war but my main point is
that we geeks think that the issues are technical when the real issues
are unfruitful political divisions.

Sure you can fire me for my views but before you do just reflect:
How different were dos and unix 20 years back and today how different
is a gnome-topped linux from a win-XP and then say whether ths issues
are essentially technical or political.

Hi Twisted:
I could give real (not made up) horror stories of my use of windows as
much as you give of your use of emacs/linux -- but I dont translate my
ignorance into condemnation.

Rustom