[Lvlug] cron

[Hanuman]

On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, Ricardo SIGNES wrote:

> * Hanuman <fingolfin at thelinuxlink.net> [2005-08-14T14:33:54]
>> 1) vim's programming language is really hideous and the other bindings
>> are very bare in terms of the functionality they expose
>
> Do you see the expression on my face?  That is the face of complete and
> utter agreement.

Well, no. Maybe if you had a digital camera.

> If Vim was, like Emacs, an application built in a special
> application-building environment that could be extended and leveraged...
> hlaghalgah!  I'd probably switch to Emacs to use elisp, if I wasn't so
> accustomed to Vim.  It would be a big exercise in yak shaving.

I was likewise heavily accustomed to Vim. But I made myself do Emacs
again strictly through willpower. I'm still not well-acquainted with
Emacs Lisp, but 90% of the customisation you need to get comfortable
with the editor is setq and adding lambda functions to hooks.

I can't say that I have my .emacs right now, but it's fairly short. The
custom interface makes things easier.

One big hurdle was actually the choice involved. With vi, vim stomps
every other vi's ass 95% of the time. With Emacs, you have GNU and
XEmacs. I personally can't stand XEmacs, for all the functionality.
Yeah, it does come with better documentation, its own package system,
not entirely unlike Slackware or BSD, and all that but it's HIDEOUSLY
bloated and doesn't have the same degree of community support as Emacs
(IMO). You find a random Elisp file somewhere, and odds are it runs on
GNU Emacs. With GNU Emacs, I just grabbed the elisp manual, intlfonts,
and emacs-lisp-intro and I have a fairly complete package. Add w3 or
whatever else you want; it does just as good a job, with way less memory
usage. Does anyone really use /everything/ in those XEmacs 'sumo'
tarballs? Because if he does, then his hygiene must be really poor. No,
most of us install what we need and nothing else.

That reminds me of the Vector Emacs packages johnvan posted on my
behalf. They're set up so that the Emacs LISP files compile when you
install it. How awesome is that??

>> 2) Inferior Scheme mode kicks ass in Emacs. I teaching someone Scheme in
>> fact, so the addition of parentheses matching and word movement commands
>> to an interactive session of Guile is very important to me.
>
> Could you elaborate on this a little?

Well, it's all there. If I were to type in guile at the prompt, I would
have no special editing capabilities. The lack of parentheses matching
alone is enough to make me run it in inferior mode.

That's the beauty of Emacs' general pseudo terminal interface which
everyone seems to think is disgusting and bloated. Really, what could be
wrong with imparting all the Emacs keybinding, syntax hilighting, etc.
to a program which would otherwise not have it? When I describe it for
what it is, it doesn't sound so awful, eh?

>> 5) Moreover, learning the emacs keybindings makes you more efficient
>> with programs that use readline, which are usually set to behave like
>> emacs. I could make bash behave like vi, but see above. The only problem
>> is I have to learn to type C-a a in GNU screen.
>
> I got used to C-a a, but it seems that everyone else in the universe who
> uses screen and emacs remaps screen to use C-t or something.

I've been writing an article on screen for a website. That's why I kept
C-a

- Hanu-mizzle