The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Twisted]

On Jun 21, 11:06 am, jadam... at partners.org (Joel J. Adamson) wrote:
> And it's baloney!  No one in my office that uses one of these supposedly
> user-friendly machines thinks that it's actually easy to use.  They
> slam their keyboards and throw their hands up *every* day.

Because of bugs or the network going down or stuff like that, I'll
bet, not because they can't find out or remember how to do some basic
task.

That's entirely orthogonal to the issue of interface learning curve OR
interface ease-of-use. Emacs has deficiencies in both areas, if
principally the former. (For an example of the latter, consider
opening a file. Can't remember the exact spelling and capitalization
of the file name? Sorry, bud, you're SOL. Go find it in some other app
and memorize the name, then return to emacs. Now THAT is what I call
disruptive context switching. Meanwhile even the lowly Notepad
responds to "open" by displaying a list of text files and tools to
navigate the folder hierarchy without having to do it blind, while
still letting you blind-type a path if you remember it. And you can
also paste the path in from the clipboard. Unix systems don't even
*have* a proper system-wide clipboard and copy/paste capability. Under
X there's a weak, text-only imitation, which doesn't help you much
when you want to copy a selection from an image in a paint program and
paste it into a CAD or web-design or specialized image-manipulation
tool or whatever...you have to save it to a file and load it, which is
a pain in the butt and slowly clutters your hard drive with
"temporary" files you occasionally forget to delete.

> The only solution that really works is for people to _learn_ how to
> use computers, and to accept that it will be a challenge.

How much learning it takes can be varied by the programmer, however.
They can choose to make the learning curve steeply vertical at
takeoff, or they can make it start out shallow and climb steeply only
when the user desires expert functionality. (They can also, stupidly,
choose to leave out fancier functionality entirely, of course.)

As for bugs and other frustrations, better robustness in the key areas
of memory management and concurrency control is needed. Most serious
(especially crash-causing, data-losing, or data-corrupting) bugs
involve memory mismanagement and a lot more, as well as other serious
bugs, result from race conditions. These sorts of bugs are also
responsible for a lot of security holes -- buffer overrun exploits are
only possible against targets with memory management and input
validation bugs. Java apps, due to Java's memory management model, are
immune to these.

The Windows world may have a fair bit to learn from the Unix world
about software reliability and QA, and also about better supporting
task automation. But not about user interface design for when tasks
are done manually.

> And as for the arcane commands needed to get to the help page, their
> on the splash screen.  Have you used Emacs recently?

Of course not. It's too hard to get started using it, so I gave up on
it years ago.