DIE, EMACS! DIE! And your spawn, too!

[vakkotaur]

Ultima Linux has a tolerable terminal text editor, jed. Or so I'd thought. Maybe it was something I did (and by mistake, for I would never intentionally cause this breakage) as I recall I could use the backspace key and it did what I expected: deleted the previous character and moved the cursor back a character. Nice, sane, sensible. Today I went to edit something and found jed instead saw CONTROL-H and rather than doing something sane (acting like a proper backspace, or even just moving the cursor back a character without deletion) it brought up some help lines and changed context on me. That's an EMACS thing. It gets in my way. Modal editors suck[1] (Okkay, so technically emacs is non-modal. It still sucks in its own special way). And even with a (non)modal editor, what kind an incompetent assigns CONTROL-H to help? CONTROL-H for Help makes sense, except that CONTROL-H is universally a 'go back one character' command or would be if EMACS and things stupidly copying it didn't break the standard.

I think I'll get a bit more serious about getting joe to install on Ultima. At least joe doesn't pull this modal crap. I don't need context switching land mines getting in my way.

There is a work-around that works in the Eterm terminal emulator. It is to issue stty erase ^H and to make it so one doesn't need to do it manually all the time, add it to /etc/profile .

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[1] Yes, I know vi is modal. It also sucks. It just sucks less due to being an editor rather than a Swiss Army Planet of a program that occasionally masquerades as an editor. Also, as vi is almost universally present, it can be used to render a system working enough to get a proper non-modal editor.

Comments

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

I can't stand using UNIX-style text editors anymore. I end up having to memorize dozens of obscure key sequences (which do nasty things if you make a typo) and looking through long printouts to find the keys for what I want to do. At work, when I need to make a text file in Unix, I just create it in Windows and FTP it over. Windows stinks in so many ways, but for text editing, it's quite efficient.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Once you get away from EMACS-clones and vi-clones things get much better. Even a line editor is at least consistent about how it works. The ironic thing about today's irritation is that the editing intended to do was to tweak settings for a very nice graphical editor, NEdit. But I had trouble tweaking the editor settings because another editor wouldn't edit properly.

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

emacs users would claim that emacs is non-modal (though there is some state information you have to remember, e.g. did you just type a ^U?).

I have a hard time dealing with emacs; I just can't remember all those key bindings.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

It must be the worst non-modal editor it's been my misfortune to fail to avoid encountering. As for state, that should be held by the computer rather than the operator. The computer can inform the operator about state. And the most important thing it can do is inform the operator of how to get out of a special state and back to the primary function of an application (if it's an editor, I wanna know how to get back to editing without any fuss). On the good side, jed seems to be the only thing in Ultima is EMACS-ish. EMACS itself was given the boot.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

While vi has its peculiarities, the consistency you mention has made it my editor of choice for UNIX based systems and even MSDOS/Windows based systems. Not for word processing of course, but for configuration files and such. At least it is always the same no matter where you are.