The Modernization of Emacs

[Twisted]

On Jun 22, 11:52 am, Bjorn Borud <borud-n... at borud.no> wrote:
> [Martin Gregorie <mar... at see.sig.for.address>]
> |
> | Yep, and the same people think a command line is to be avoided at all
> | costs. "I mean, its so /last century/ and you can't do anything useful
> | with it anyway".

I think a command line can be useful as a way to directly talk to
something's brain. More GUI apps should have a command processor you
can access to do something arcane once in a while. The other thing a
command processor is good for is providing automation support.

Windows is definitely weak on allowing things like editors to be
embedded and used as components by other applications. OLE makes it
theoretically possible to e.g. use Winword in an IDE but who'd want
to? It also doesn't provide a system-wide way to select particular
components to do particular jobs -- the closest thing would be
splitting comctl32.dll into separate dlls for each common task or
dialog and allowing third-party drop-in replacements to be found in a
user-specific directory that override the defaults. That sort of
modularity and choice is alien to MS thought patterns however.
Combining the flexibility of componentry in Unix with the graphical
power of Windows might lead to something awesome ... which makes KDE
and Gnome things to keep eyes on in the future.

> I have observed similar opinions in other non-computer-freaks.  people
> who see the computer only as a tool and are only interested in getting
> the job done.  they have a surprising preference for Linux.

But not emacs, I'll bet. I think emacs appeals to people who like
dealing with the mechanics of emacs or fiddling with and extending the
darn thing. But most people just want to get the job done, and the
editor or other tools they use have to get out of the way and simply
let them work. If their attention keeps being dragged forcible from
THE JOB to THE TOOL and how to make this cantankerous thing do *this*?
then there is a problem. If I sit down at a windows text editor (or
even kwrite or similar) I can just focus on the job. Faced with emacs
or most other text-mode editors (but not MS-DOS Edit, interestingly)
the editor keeps intruding on my focus. Oops.

Elsewhere, you mentioned 3 second attention spans -- I think you'll
find people are much more willing to spend 3 hours of attention on
their task than 3 seconds on your favorite tool. When the tool
intrudes into the user's attention (either by misbehaving, e.g.
crashing, or by confounding the user as to how to do what they want to
do next), then a problem is evident.