Installing speechd-el with word echo, Semi OT: The Big Deal About Emacs

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Hi, I don't use Emacs or Linux for mail just yet, so I'll reduce to more 
conventional quoting in stead. This is getting OT, thus the subject change, 
but I thought someone might find it useful to find out what people liek 
about Emacs. I certainly wondered what's the big deal, before reading about 
it (Learning GNU Emacs and bits of Googling) and trying things on my own. 
Feel free to reply off-list, too.

Milan Zamazal wrote:
> Veli-Pekka T?til? wrote:
> > 4. Next there was unpacking the tar.gz archive. I could normally
> > use the extract here context menu entry in Nautilus but I don't
> > know how to become root in Gnome, so that was no good. In stead,
> > I ended up extracting it in the root of my Emacs loadpath using
> > tar as documented here:
> I think you will learn through time how many things are easier to do
> from command line than from GNOME tools.
Especially as even the LInux GUis are not as power user oriented as I'd 
like. I'd agree in general apart from directory navigation and 
autocompletion as done in say WIn32 lists. Theres nothing quite like that in 
tab completing with speech. The key is real time feedback of the currently 
matching item if it changed, after every key press. But there are reasonable 
alternatives, such as dirEd with incremental searching.

> It is just necessary to know how to access documentation.
I wish there was something briefer than ref manuals. They tell you 
everything in order down to the finest detail. quite often I'd liek things 
in the order of importance or frequency of use in stead. It is like a good 
LaTeX book telling you enough to say get good tables done blind, rather than 
going through all options reference like.

> I like `woman' more, but it can't display some man pages in which case
> `man' helps.
I've used both a bit. Does woman have aesy means of jumping to the next/prev 
switch (by regexp matcing) or the next/prev heading in a man page? This 
would be extremely useful in quick browsing. Yet my keys to browse by page, 
paragraph and output group don't do that. It doesn't seem to be browsable as 
outlines, either, that would be neat. I truely like the outline mode on 
paper, at least.

Which brings me to another point. I'm gradually realizing what some of the 
big deal about Emacs is, and that is the file management:

No-one told me that but I figured out the shell mode is far superior to any 
console screen reader I have ever used, period. Where they require you to 
have a virtual cursor modally, In Emacs you can use the EMacs cursor 
directly with no mode switching and to type in the shell, if I've understood 
things right. You can also jump by command and get to the top or bottom of 
the output for a command, none of which a genral purpose screen reader can 
do. You can even do incremental regexp matching, which is just so much more 
powerful, more intuitive and easier, because of the feedback, than temporary 
grepping would be. I really, realy like this mode. If only Emacs would use 
PCRE regexp, I'd be even more at home.

I'd go so far as to say I think I would rather use shell mode than a real 
shell because of the navigation aids and matching. Heck, in cua-mode Emacs 
can use more Gnomeish key bindings for commandline editing than the 
gnome-terminal itself can, man I'm impressed. On a side note, can one 
redirect shell mode I/O from and to a named buffer or register directly? 
That'd be cool. I like named scratch buffers, named registeres for holding 
positions, and the mark ring. i can recall names, even 1 char long, much 
better than numbers. t for todo, b for buggy function etc...

The other big thing is dirEd, the spelling makes speech synths pronounce it 
right. I don't like it quite as much as some of the GUi file managers, 
Xplorer 2 for Windows, but it is certainly easier to use than cd:ing around 
with auto complete and some manual parsing of ls output. You can drop to a 
shell, too.  and do the same kind of searching and navigation as with any 
Emacs buffer.

And the important thing it is fast. I hate Nautilus it is slow and not 
really powerful, either, considering we're talking LInux. It does not even 
have panes, Norton COmmander had them years and years ago, nough said. WEll 
shell mode does not iether, but you can have n shells open and switch to 
them by name or toggle betweeen recent ones.

I'd like to try out e-mail reading and editing, too, since having the 
machine do any mail quoting and rewrapping of lines sounds wonderful. Now I 
feel stupid having to manually cursor by line rather than by sentence, and 
to snip mid sentence, manually inserting quote lines and manually 
rewrapping. That's what I'm doing now, every single day time wasted for 
something a machine cab do. how ancient is the mail support, can one easily 
use Gmail in Emacs meaning IMAP and SSL?

When I've learned enough, I might do a page called the big deal about Emacs 
for the blind. Which should hopefully motivate folks to pick it up, and tell 
you when Gedit, NoteTab or even Vim is not good enough.

> > 5. Of course it created a subdir which proved problematic. I
> > learned the hardway subdirs of the loadpath are not scanned,
> > just the root unless you tell otherwise.
> You can add a directory to your load path by putting
>   (add-to-list 'load-path "/some/load/path/here")
Ah yes, that's the ticket. I thought it would be cons, car and cdr again. I 
might try this to customize the default speechd-el voice, too.

> try setting
>   export EDITOR=emacs
> in your shell startup files (typically ~/.bashrc).
Which reminds me, can one tell dirEd to use Gnome file associations? If not, 
I could probably do a Perl script if I know the source and target formats. 
Aarrgh, I bet it will be g-conf.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka T?til?
Accessibility, Apps and Coding plus Synths and Music:
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi