A Exhibition Of Tech Geekers Incompetence: Emacs whitespace-mode

[Xah Lee]

Fresh out of the oven:

• How to use and setup Emacs's whitespace-mode
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/whitespace-mode.html

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

On Aug 13, 6:36 pm, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
> • A Exhibition Of Tech Geekers Incompetence: Emacs whitespace-mode
>  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/emacs_whitespace-mode_problems.html
>
> plane text version follows:
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> A Exhibition Of Tech Geekers Incompetence: Emacs whitespace-mode
>
> Xah Lee, 2009-08-13
>
> Just wanted to express some frustration with whitespace-mode.
>
> Emacs 23, just released, has this whitespace-mode feature. It renders
> spaces, tabs, newlines characters with a visible glyph. This feature,
> is in Microsoft Word since about 1992.
>
> This feature is important in practical ways. For example, when you
> work with “tab separated line” files (CSV) that's a common format for
> importing/exporting address books or spreadsheets. It's also important
> in whitespace-significant langs such as Python. Or, in text processing
> when placement of space and tabs matters in the output.
>
> All i wanted, is to make Space and Tab and Newline chars visible.
>
> However, the emacs whitespace-mode does much more than that. It is
> designed for tech geeking control freaks to tune every aspect of white
> space in his source code. The mode is filled with bells and whistles.
> It distinguishes tabs mixed with spaces, EOLs mixed with spaces, EOLs
> at beginning of file, EOLs at end of file, run on spaces at end of
> line, lines that has nothing to do with white spaces but is simply
> longer than 80 chars, etc. Each of these is rendered with different
> foreground, background, colors, so that they cannot possibly escape
> the notices of control freaks.
>
> By default, most of these are on, so that, when you turn on the mode,
> most reasonable clean source code become this colorful rainbow
> unreadable fuck.
>
> I tried to tune it, with my 10 years of emacs of fucking 16 hours of
> using per day, and 3 years of elisp coding experience. But, after a
> hour, it's confusion hell sans avail.
>
> O, that Alex idiot with his emacswiki, refused to lead emacswiki into
> any readable state. All he can think about is my social skills. (See:
> Problems of Emacswiki.)
>
> What the fuck motherfuck. Hi tech geekers, coding freaks, social
> science ignoramus fucks, basic economics illiterate FSF fucks, freedom
> abusing selfish ideologists fucks, Richard Stallman propagandist fuck,
> we-try-to-be-easy-to-use linuxer idioting fucks, FUCK U.
>
>   Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
>
> ☄