This is Mikael Cardell writing from a new e-mail address. I'll tell
you all about hack.org in a separate message as soon I can get some
peace and quiet around me. Anyway, it seems I have a huge backlog of
mail, so I might skip a few threads I was involved in. This, however,
is very close to me:
J. Michael New writes:
> Mikael:
> > That depends if you consider, for example, Emacs as *one* application
> > or a layer for elisp applications. Emacs is a rather nice operating
> > system, after all... Except for its lousy multi-tasking and its
> > non-incremental garbage collection.
>
> ...and its help system, and the fact that you have to be a system
> manager and a Lisp programmer to use it for anything more than
> text editing...
Uh... Its help system? Are you refering to Emacs info? It's really
very easy, hypertext based. It looks like a text based WWW
browser. Something like that. It's really very easy. Of course, if you
really want to, you can get a lot of information in other ways, such
as C-h m for help on the current major-mode or C-h b for a list of
current bindings, or C-h a for a possibility to type in a regular
expression matching variables, functions or just about anything.
And yes, you are right that it really helps to know Lisp if you're
going to do advanced things with Emacs, but you don't have to. For
instance, my wife Helena has recently finished her first thesis in
Anthropology, a really good thing about hacker humour (in Swedish, I'm
afraid) and she wrote it with GNU Emacs 19.30 under X11, marking the
text with LaTeX and viewing the result with xdvi. Helenas is by no
means a power user and has almost no previous experience of Emacs or
LaTeX.
> This is the reason people's definition of a good operating system
> is so varied. To an experienced hacker or computer scientist, things
> like emacs, which are powerful but which take an everyday user ages
> to learn, are beautiful. Most of us want something we can start up
> and start typing or whatever - and if we want to try something else
> we look in the menus and then in the help.
Ah, but I agree. The great thing with computers is that you can make
them behave in *any* way. I want the interface to be utterly flexible,
so any user, whatever level, can feel right at home. This is the
Proper Thing to do.
-- Mikael "MC" Cardell <mc@hack.org> Hacker of convivial tools "I'd rather write programs that write programs than write programs" Dick Sites, DEC