Re: emacs newbie

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

>> I've gone through the tutorial. I was wondering if there is a recommended
>> tutorial/writeup that I can go over?
>
> Yes this is the bare minimum to get used to

Yes.


> - strange keys -- C-x is different from everything else on the planet
> (for that matter does anybody outside emacs even understand that 'C-x'
> means control-X?),

No.

It's the others who adopted AFTER emacs set the standard, strange keys.
emacs was there before.



> - weird terminology -- what everyone calls Alt emacs calls meta, what
> emacs refers to as window, is not what you would expect and so on.

No.

It's the others who adopted AFTER emacs set the standard, weird terminology.
emacs was there before.  Even before Smalltalk invented its own
"windows" inside the Smalltalk "frame"!

And Alt and Meta are not the same key.
A normal keyboard: http://world.std.com/~jdostale/kbd/SpaceCadet1.jpeg

It's the cheap toy PC keyboards that lack a whole bunch of keys, moved
AltMode to some strange place near the space bar and are otherwise
crippled.

On a normal keyboard, you have both Control, Meta, Hyper, Super, Shift
and Alt, amongst other keys and modifiers.

That said, even on a crippled PC keyboard, you have enough keys to map
at least one of each, including both Meta and Alt.

And in emacs, you can bind M-z to something, and A-z to something else,
and even M-A-z to a third command.



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