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Re: Emacs: Problems of the Scratch Buffer


From: ken
Subject: Re: Emacs: Problems of the Scratch Buffer
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:44:15 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0.3) Gecko/20120314 Thunderbird/10.0.3



On 04/24/2012 07:35 AM Richard Riley wrote:
rusi<rustompmody@gmail.com>  writes:

I'll try and restate what Xah is saying in less Xah-ish language.

Emacs comes from a time when anyone who used a computer knew (about)
programming.
Today everyone uses a computer; so the programmers are the freaks.

The scratch buffer is meaningful/useful/beautiful for those who can
understand what it signifies that they can (re)program their editor.

It is a stupid and meaningless irritation to those not so endowed.


Even speaking as a programmer I have to agree. I am surprised anyone
disagrees. Anyone clued in enough to emacs to know what *Scratch* is for
can create their own easily enough from their .emacs.

I still recall from decades ago my first experiences with emacs. Yes, the *scratch* buffer was in those first few months a bit of a mystery, but certainly in no way "a stupid and meaningless irritation".

What's much more of an irritation is this continual urge to dumb down software or make it more like an MS product-- oftentimes one and the same goal. This more often than not leads to the elimination of features and functionality which seasoned users (and, No, not in every case programmers) are accustomed to. If a person is irritated by the extra features and functionality, she has plenty of options to deal with them: learn how to turn them off, learn how to use them, learn how to deal with the fact that she doesn't understand everything in the software within the first week of using it, or switch to some other software which is less challenging and so less "irritating".

One option that newbies don't get-- and I'm speaking especially to those with an inflated sense of their own wisdom and opinions-- is to decide for everyone what features and functionality the software should and shouldn't have... and even less to then expect expect everyone else to make the efforts to adjust to their naive views and ridiculously low irritation thresholds.




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