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Re: Successfully merged projects


From: Richard Crozier
Subject: Re: Successfully merged projects
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:12:28 -0700 (PDT)

John W. Eaton wrote:
> 
> On 11-Apr-2011, Richard Crozier wrote:
> 
> | It is a slight
> | indictment I think that it has been easier for me to code the features I
> | wanted into QtOctave, than it seemed to be to learn emacs.
> 
> I'm really curious about what you find difficult.
> 
> Have you tried going through the Emacs tutorial?  Start Emacs and type
> 
>   M-x help-with-tutorial
> 
> or
> 
>   C-h t
> 
> or select the tutorial from the help menu.
> 
> jwe
> 

What's M-x? How do I do that, and what's supposed to happen? Is that holding
down the M key then pressing x then tying in the words help-with-tutorial?
Do i have to hold down M the whole time? Does it mean shift+M? Do I press
enter at the end?

Does C-h t mean press and hold CTRL and press the h key at the same time,
then let go of h and CTRL and then press the t key? 

Learning emacs isn't hard in the sense that a difficult physics problem is
hard. It's hard in the way that learning pi to 50 decimal places is hard, or
learning chinese is hard, there's a lot to learn. I actually did start going
through the emacs tutorial some time ago, or at least the xemacs tutorial
(is this the same?) and will have known the things above for a short time
after this, but have already forgotten. I've just had a look, and now know
again that M refers to the Alt key on most PCs.

It also doesn't help that we use the NX client to connect remotely to the
linux machines at work, and this seems to crash emacs, possibly related to
fonts or something. 

Xemacs does work so I've just started that to remind myself of what the big
deal is. When I selected tutorial from the menu I got a message at the
bottom saying do I want to copy some file ./.xemacs/ or something yes or no?
I didn't know if i wanted this, I tried hitting enter hoping it would choose
the default, it didn't, I must choose yes or no. I thought screw it, and
typed yes. I then went to the tutorial menu again and got a similar message,
this time with .emacs in it, I chose yes. I went to the tutorial menu again,
this time the tutorial opened. The tutorial makes sense, but there's a lot
of new terminology to learn, a lot of new keystrokes. I have to 'yank' and
'kill' instead of cut and paste for instance. 

At this point I think, I don't care how good it is, it's not worth the
feeling of, 'will this really really ever pay off?' At some point you start
to think, will my PhD supervisor/boss appreciate the time I'm spending on
this, or would he rather I just made do with something else and did some
actual work? I could have finished off that thermal simulation by now
instead of reading this tutorial!

So that's what's difficult about emacs. I don't want a new way of working
with computers, I just want to debug some octave code.

--
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