The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Twisted]

On Jun 20, 5:03 pm, Kaldrenon <kaldre... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I still have a good deal to learn, even of the basics, but I've toyed
> with it casually for a little bit (a total of two hours at most, but
> almost certainly less) and I already know enough that finding out how
> to do anything else IS trivial. It's not a program whose controls
> throw themselves at you, exactly, but with a touch of patience and a
> genuine interest in learning, it's not too bad.

I don't know what software you're describing, but it's obviously not
emacs, unless there have been some HUGE changes to (at minimum) the
help and pane-navigation (er, excuse me, "window"-navigation)
controls...

My experiences (with emacs and with a lot of other supposedly-
superior, usually unix-heritage software) put me in mind of an
analogy: fumbling around in a strange house in the dark without a
flashlight, banging into furniture frequently, trying to find a light
switch, but it turns out the switches are all spring-loaded. For some
reason (saving electricity and fighting the war against global
warming?) if you go to start doing anything else the light goes off
again immediately -- so you have to stand there holding the switch,
memorize the contents of the room, and then quickly do whatever you
needed to do before your memory of the room's layout and where things
are fades! Then back to the switch, or trip and fumble your way to a
different room's switch...wash, rinse, repeat...

Nobody would actually design a home (or a workplace) like that in a
trillion years, global warming be damned. So why do people still
sometimes design software like that?

Oh and did I mention that these houses' layouts are also totally
strange, with the living room on the top floor and the kitchen in the
basement, or other things of that nature, so you can't transfer any
knowledge of conventional home designs to aid in your navigation
there...and they are even all different from one another, nevermind
"normal" houses...

BTW, is anyone else finding Google Groups especially ornery of late? I
get all of the following, recurrently:

* I enter one reply in a thread, and it works. Then I go to make a
second reply, and I get a text box like one uses to enter a reply,
except evidently read-only -- I can select text but there is no
blinking cursor.
* The fix seems to be to navigate off the page and back.
Unfortunately, that then pops up some dialog. I think GG is trying to
protect me from losing unsaved changes, except that there are
obviously no unsaved changes to the (read-only!) form for me to lose!
* The "back" button is wonky -- it seems to require hitting back
*twice* to go back *one* page to the previous page of the thread or to
the newsgroup's thread index, if already on the first (or only) page.
* After *that*, "forward" behaves sometimes normally and sometimes as
"forward and then click a reply link on some random post"??
* Submitting a post results in the form disappearing and being
replaced by "The post was entered successfully". Of course, if it
turns out to have NOT been all that successful as evidenced from
refreshing the page or using an external newsserver (I have found one
read-only one suitable for verifying that a posting succeeded and
propagated beyond GG's server), there's no way to get back to the form
to try to resubmit the text, or even to recover it to the clipboard to
paste into a fresh form for a fresh attempt. So far, it's never
actually lied and claimed a posting was successful that wasn't, but
there's a first time for everything, and we all know the track record
for QA in the software industry ... and the way one of the more common
failure modes of software is silent failure, claiming success on
failure, claiming failure on success, or claiming one failure when a
different failure happened! (All the various forms of diagnostics
failure...) I guess I have to pre-emptively copy the form contents to
the clipboard before clicking submit, and preserve the clipboard
contents pending verification, or risk catastrophic data loss, because
GG can't be arsed to make a decent interface, or even to leave well
enough alone and stop constantly changing it.