[geeks] Re: [rescue] RE: Small schools.& elections

[David Cantrell]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 11:01:04PM -0400, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:

> In this day and age of monstrous amounts of CPU cylces going unused, isn't
> it time to use a text editor that pretends to have a brain?
> 
> For instance, in the two emacs (I don't believe in keeping only one copy
> of emacs open) that I have open now, one of them is managing the white
> space in some python scripts (python was meant to be edited with a smart
> editor, I kid you not), and provides a class browser.

Yeah, if I used python, I'd use emacs.

> I'm sure you've heard these things before.  I understand prefering vi's
> keysequences to emacs chords, but what makes people prefer such a lack of
> features?

I use both.  But I use them for different purposes.  emacs for writing
text - whether it be plain ol' ASCII or TeX.  vi for editing code - because
I will not tolerate my editor screwing with my formatting.  And emacs,
at least as installed on my systems, goes out of its way to fuck with the
indentation in my perl and C code.  For example, I do:

foreach my $foo (@array_of_foos) {
[tab]   blah;
        blah;
        blah;
}

and emacs turns my nice little tabs into:

foreach my $foo (@array_of_foos) {
                                  blah;
                                  blah;
                                  blah;
}

which is kinda silly if you ever nest stuff more than one or two levels
deep (a subroutine definition, a conditional and a loop is sufficient to
make that broken formatting start line-wrapping horribly).

Yes, I know I could change this.  But I don't have the time or the patience
to learn elisp, find the relevant bit of code, play with it, test it, etc.
And anyone telling me that it's easy will be cheerfully ignored :-)

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/

      Good advice is always certain to be ignored,
      but that's no reason not to give it            -- Agatha Christie