Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Elena <egarrulo@gmail.com> writes:

> On Dec 3, 5:44 am, "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com>
> wrote:
>> And if you're editing text more than four hours a day, you should be
>> programming emacs to ease and automatize your editing.
>
> That's the issue: how do you know how to automatize your editing?  You
> lack the knowledge and/or experience to do it.  That's why you should
> rely on a work-flow designed by experienced users, which you can tweak
> later.  Unless you enjoy reinventing the wheel, and possibly
> reinventing it trapezoidal.

You are a programmer, therefore you should know.

Unfortunately, you haven't realized yet, that emacs is just a virtual
machine with a nice programming language, and that editing or
integrating development environments are but a set of libraries and
programs written in this programming language.  As a programmer, you
should be constantly writing emacs lisp program, instead of mere
"editing", at least until your editing becomes non repeatitive.  And you
should not stop.   When you're asked for the third time to write the
same kind of Java program, you should be writing an AI, in emacs lisp,
to do it for you!



> Thank goddess somebody invented modal editing.  It is the most
> effective way to edit text I can think of, now that I know it, and I
> don't know whether I could have invented such a thing even in forty
> years.

This is the oldest way editing was done.

You typed characters on a keyboard that were immediately punched on a
punch card.  If it was wrong, you would remove the card by hand, or
re-order the cards, by hand.  Two totally distinct modes of editing:
typing to punch the caracters, hand shuffling of cards to manage the
lines.

Then, on unix, the oldest editor is ed(1), which is entirely modal.  You
have to type a command even to insert or append characters.



What's a big progress, is actually non-modal editing like found in
emacs, and all the GUI editors and IDEs.  It might have been invented
before 1969 on other systems than unix, but I believe it was invented
later, perhaps with the original TECO EMACS.



>> Of course, if you're editing text for ten years or more, you should be
>> using emacs (and learning to better use it everyday) for ten years or
>> more.
>
> Not when Emacs lacks support for what I'm doing.  Currently I'm
> forced[1] to use Visual Studio or Eclipse for *code* editing, and I
> switch to Emacs only when I have to perform some heavy *text*
> editing.  *Code* editing is a more specific task than *text* editing,
> and an IDE is better equipped for the former task.  Disclosure: I'm
> using a Vim-emulation plugin both on Visual Studio and Eclipse,
> therefore I don't feel the pain of almost non-existing text-editing
> features of both Visual Studio and Eclipse.

An IDE user is not a programmer, most like a code monkey...


> [1] "forced" means I have to do it, unless I want some colleagues of
> mine to eat my lunch.  Of course I could develop my own half-assed IDE
> on top of Emacs, if I had more time to spend in my hands.

No, go beyond the IDE!  Aim for the AI!

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.