Hi Nadav! Thanks for your reply - it was very informative.
I read the tutorial, but it could only help me so far. Why when I type
"enter" does the cursor move to the beginning of the line, and wait for me
to press tab to indent itself properly? Maybe I'm too fixed on gvim, but
it seems to make perfect sense to me. I was told XEmacs takes time to get
used to, but I actually got used to gvim very quickly. It took me time to
learn how to do "everything" in it (you only learn it until you want to
program a vi macro - ;-)), but I could use it in a reduced way.
I'd rather not read 1000 pages, in any rate just to learn everything about
an editor that I only use for "Meta-X ispell-buffer" for the while. I
actually like using gvim better than working on MS DevStudio[1]. Trying to
master Emacs at the while is not a good idea. I'd rather learn to use
every feature when I need to, and gradually become more experienced with
it.
Maybe I'll read the O'Reilly Book first, but I have too many books on my
queue as it is... ;-)
Hopefully, XEmacs support bottom-up learning as much as it does top-down.
Every good software should. You can try to learn UNIX by learning about
forking, but you can also start by experiencing with the bash or zsh[2]
prompt, or with working with KDE. Either way, you are going to learn UNIX
sooner or later.
The problem with Windows is that I think you can only learn this much
about it, without wondering how everything else is implemented. Several
books were written describing the Windows Registry, and obviously, if I
have to manually set the coordinates in some obscure registry branch to
get Netscape to display, somewhere not entirely off the screen (a true
story), than it is a bad user-design.
UNIX CLI commands are allowed to have obscure configuration mechanisms,
because only power users will want to start tweaking them. But GUI
programs need to have a graphical interface to configure them. The
designers of Windows 95 should have thought of something like GConf to
configure the INI files or whatever mechanism could safely be used to
maintain a consistent manual configuration experience. That way, those who
knew what they were doing would use notepad and those who don't would use
the GUI.
BTW, I discovered WinAmp uses an INI file and it turned out to be
essential to remove it from an ill-configured default configuration.
WinAmp seems keen on interfering with one's work as little as possible, so
they may have prefered using an INI file that the more standard registry.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
[1] - I still remember Borland C++ 4.52 as actually enjoyable, and MS
DevStudio as something that was quite unusable, and becomes more so in any
subsequent version. But gvim is also nice, even it has a lot less cute
bells and whistles.
[2] - tcsh is not a UNIX shell, according to any sane conception of such a
tool. And zsh was added just for you Nadav.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
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