The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Twisted]

On Jun 26, 6:06 am, Gian Uberto Lauri <s... at spammer.impiccati.it>
wrote:
> >> > HOW IN THE BLOODY HELL IS IT SUPPOSED TO OCCUR TO SOMEONE TO
> >> ENTER > THEM, GIVEN THAT THEY HAVE TO DO SO TO REACH THE HELP THAT
> >> WOULD TELL > THEM THOSE ARE THE KEYS TO REACH THE HELP?!
>
> >> What's your problem ?
>
> >> Ofcourse a mere program-consumer would not look what was being
> >> installed on his/her system in the first place ...  So after some
> >> trivial perusing what was installed and where : WOW Look, MA !
> >> .... it's all there!
>
> >> lpr /usr/local/share/emacs/21.3/etc/refcard.ps or your
> >> install-dir........^ ^ or your
> >> version.............................^
>
> n> So now we're expected to go on a filesystem fishing expedition
> n> instead of just hit F1? One small step (backwards) for a man; one
> n> giant leap (backwards) for mankind. :P

[snipping some thinly-veiled insults and irrelevancies throughout]

> There's a program called find, not this intuitive but worth learning
>
> It could solve the problem from the root with something like
>
> find / -name refcard.ps -exec lpr {} \; 2> /dev/null

Let me get this straight.

In this corner, we have just about every Windows application ever
developed. When a user needs help, a click on the "help" menu or tap
of the F1 key is all it takes to obtain some. Sometimes the help is
not of the greatest quality, but that is another issue we won't
concern ourselves with here.

In the other corner, we have just about every Unix application ever
developed. When a user needs help, they may do such things as manually
explore the directories where the application was installed
(equivalent to rooting around in C:\Program Files\Appname for .hlp
files, because F1 didn't work and there was no "help" menu, if such a
thing ever happened on Windoze). Or alternatively it can just
magically come to them as a divinely inspired insight, or in a dream
or a burning bush or stone tablets from heaven or something, that
something useful might happen if the unlikely combination of symbols
"find / -name refcard.ps -exec lpr {} \; 2> /dev/null" were typed at
the console, which otherwise would obviously never occur to them. Even
if they knew the find tool and its syntax, it would still have to
somehow occur to them that "refcard.ps" might be a useful search
target. On Windows, if push came to shove, clicking Start->Search and
putting in ".hlp" and "C:\Program Files\Appname" would quickly find
any help files. If they were given the usual file extension. If not,
good luck, but most usually the help files would be named to end
with .hlp. Moreover, once found, a quick double click and they're in a
hypertext browser viewing the help. Unless I miss my guess, refcard.ps
would require mucking about installing and configuring Ghostscript and
GSView, which for Joe Winblows User is daunting enough. Trying to read
anything serious and navigate in GSView is no picnic either. A
hypertext browser it ain't. Adobe Acrobat Reader *might* be able to do
more with a .ps file, but it's proprietary. On a Unix box, if you
don't know exactly how to get some app viewing a .ps file and how to
navigate in it I'm guessing you're SOL. The original suggestion with
"lpr" implies printing it rather than viewing it online, which a)
costs money and b) requires configuring a printer and a Postscript
interpreter, given that unless the printer cost more than the
computer's CPU it surely won't natively grok Postscript. We're back to
configuring Ghostscript, only this time on the Unix box where I have
no doubt it's even more painful than it is on a Windoze box, as well
as configuring a printer on a Unix box, itself a recurring nightmare
of mine for years now since one night in the nineties when I got
caught in the crossfire between someone's Epson inkjet and their
Mandrake 7.somethingorother Linux.

Reexamining that "find" line it looks like it tries to automatically
"lpr" the file(s) found. That is cause for concern, since I can easily
see something like this going into Sorceror's Apprentice mode and
costing you a fortune in ink and paper if there's either a misspelling
or other mistake (easy enough to make in a complex arcane command line
like that one) or more "refcard.ps" matches than you expected there'd
be in the target directory and its descendants.