The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Robert Uhl]

Falcolas <garrickp at gmail.com> writes:
>
> 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.

That's the advantage of a well-organised set of commands.  If you want
to use regexp search, you have to look at the dialogue box and click on
a checkbox--which would be a context switch.

That's even assuming that your editor _offers_ regexp search.  If emacs
didn't have it, I could add it, and it'd be just as much part of the
editor as if it were included...

> 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).

Consistency is nice.  That's be why the emacs are found throughout
Unix.  In fact, for a long time Netscape used emacs bindings on Macs and
Windows.  Among these bindings are C-a to go the beginning of a line,
C-e to go to the end, C-k to kill from point to the end of the line, M-b
and M-f to move forward and back by word and so forth.

It's Mac OS and Windows which are inconsistent.  Emacs has been around
since they were mere glimmers in the eye of Jobs & Gates...

-- 
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
Just because I'm not doing anything, doesn't mean I have nothing to do!
                                                        --Ellen Winnie