The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[David Kastrup]

Twisted <twisted0n3 at gmail.com> writes:

> On Jul 8, 4:28 am, Adriano Varoli Piazza <mora... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> b) If you do want to keep an antediluvian copy of emacs -probably
>> versioned in the negative numbers, for all you've said- please do. Do
>> be so kind as to send a copy, since it might be quite valuable as an
>> antique.
>
> Judging by the existence of the newsgroup comp.emacs, emacs is
> indeed considered by some to be a quite valuable antique. Otherwise
> why on earth would it have an apparently fairly active newsgroup a
> full seven years into the 21st century?

As opposed to your brain, Emacs has not undergone fossilization 10
years ago.  While a newsgroup discussing your dim recollections of
Emacs would indeed be boring (apart from the amusement value of your
pomposity), a newsgroup discussing current (and evolving) versions and
use of Emacs has its place.  And anyway, the language C has changed
much less in the last 10 years than Emacs has, and you'll still find
active discussion groups for that, too: it is still very much in use,
like Emacs.

As a note aside, you'd be hard put to find an editor that manages a
similar multitude of encodings as well as Emacs does.  While it is to
be expected that in the long term utf-8-encoded Unicode is the way of
the future (and Emacs is going to focus more on that in future
versions, too), at the moment there are few editors which keep up with
the existing multitude of multibyte encodings as well as Emacs does.

Emacs also makes it fairly easy to input stuff without much hassle, so
you can easily write things like ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος or каша гречневая.

So even if you don't like the user interface of Emacs from 10 years
ago and delight in assuming that it did not change in all that time,
there would be valid reasons for using it nevertheless.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum