Subject: Re: Want to write a word processor ? (this From: physadm@phys.canterbury.ac.nz (Andrew McGregor) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 02:30:09 GMT
In article 93May31161847@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu, wmperry@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (William M. Perry) writes:
>> gthomas@fraser.sfu.ca (Guy Thomas) writes:
>[...]
>>Personally, I have to agree that emacs is extremely user hostile!
>>Once a new user manages to setup a reasonable set of key definitions
>>it is nice, but they have to learn a new programming language to do
>>it.
>
> Its not all that difficult to look at someone's .emacs and say
>'hmmm -I guess define-key defines a key . . .' ;) BTW: I think its
>definitely a nono to use anyone's .emacs unless you fully grok it.
>Otherwise, what's the point?
You can, as a system admin, put on a version of emacs that is quite
heavily customised to make it a more friendly editor, and as far as the
users are concerned, that IS emacs. I think, though, that more of this
stuff should be in the distributions.
>
>>However, I do think that with a little bit of effort a .emacs file of
>>general use could be written. Handy features would be:
>
> Don't think you'd want mine. :) 600+ lines of lisp code. Yes, in
>case you haven't guessed it yet, I'm one of those 'emacs weenies' who
>enjoys writing lisp code for fun. I think people should write their
>own .emacs (the console.el/linux.el file does quite enough with
>redefining keys for the average person - print screen does just that,
>insert toggles between insert/overwrite mode, home, end, pageup,
>pagedown, etc all work)
Our system emacs is Lucid 19 + 18000 lines of elisp (not, by a long
way, all written here!) + several meg of info files. New users find it
quite friendly as a front end to LaTeX, but I'd like the quasi-wysiwyg
discussion to bear fruit.
>> 2. Predefined menus for emacs and x11emacs.
>
> Menus are evil. 'nuf said. :) Actually, Lucid Emacs' menus are
>very nice, and trivial to work with from within a lisp program. The
>menus in v19 emacs are functional, but slow and ugly. (No offense RMS)
But, for a new user, menus are the easiest way to find the features of
the program. I agree about lucid vs v19.
>> 5. Other ideas?
>>Maybe an idea to help encourage work in
>>this area would be a contest? i.e. Who can generate the most
>>user-friendly interphase to emacs for Linux machines? Obviously to
>>really get somewhere this would have to be a periodic contest so
>>future contestants would build on past winner's work? Any ideas for
>>prizes? Presumably something to make the winner feel good, not an
>>actual monitary incentive...
>
Why limit it to Linux machines? Elisp is a non-issue to port, up to
availablity of fonts and variations in keyboards, which can be
auto-detected anyhow.