On Thursday, July 13, "Nat Goodspeed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >At 11:13 AM 7/13/2006, Stephen F. Heffner wrote: >>FWIW, there are those of us who are fast touch typists, and we don't want to >>remove our fingers from the main keyboard; it slows >>things down a lot. ...
> Very true. But (a) it actively discourages newcomers, and (b) I >still suspect that the reason has more to do with ASCII terminals >than with fast typists... I don't think so. The primary issue, as Stephen wrote, is that removing one's fingers from the home position slows things down and causes mistakes. Even the ASCII terminals had extra function keys. When I first started using emacs, I was coming from DEC's EDT text editor and I was still constrained by a VT100-like ASCII terminal. It was convenient for me to adopt the EDT emulation mode, which did exploit the extra function keys. As I became more accustomed to Emacs, I started using some of the regular Emacs bindings precisely because they did not necessitate removing my fingers from the home keys. There was a point in my career (around '90) when there was a lapse in my access to Emacs. When I was able to return to Emacs after a couple years, I decided to drop my EDT 'crutch', as I found it awkward to use somebody else's installation of Emacs. I gave up EDT mode entirely. I have never regretted it. (I think the only remnant of EDT in my current setup is that my M-d deletes up to the beginning of the next whitespace-delimited word instead of through the end of the current word where "end of word" is in Emacs's sense (which can be delimited by lots of things in addition to whitespace). I do have another way to delete the current word in the Emacs sense when that is what I actually want to do.) Regards, David V.
