[rescue] SUN PCMCIA SBus Card

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 27 May 2018 at 22:45, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

>    Well.  Once again, this is not an uncommon statement to hear from
> people who don't like emacs.  I've been hearing exactly this, or
> variations of it, since the mid-80s.  Screwdrivers make awful hammers
> too, and this should not be surprising.

My complaint is simpler.

Back in the 1980s, I knew lots of text editors and word processors, and
they were all different, with different UIs and different keystrokes and so
on. WordStar (classic, NewWord, 1512/Express, 2000), WordPerfect,
MultiMate, DisplayWrite, LocoScript, Samna Executive, MS Word for DOS
4/5/5.5, edlin, VAX EDT, IBM E on OS/2, etc.

Then came the Mac and IBM CUA, and homogeneity slowly started to prevail.
 From DR-DOS 5 and MS-DOS 5 EDIT.COM/EDIT.EXE, to Notepad, TeachText,
SimpleText, KDE Kate, GNOME Gedit, Geany, Leafpad, OS X Text Editor, BB
Write, TextWrangler -- basically _all_ text editors after about MS-DOS 5
and Windows 2 conform to the same basic UI.

A menu bar at the top, with File first, then Edit, View, etc. and ending in
Help.

Ctrl on PCs, Cmd on Macs, but always:

Ctrl-C to copy, Ctrl-X to cut, Ctrl-V to paste. Ctrl-O to open a file,
Ctrl-S to save it. Ctrl-F to find text.

Block selection is always shift+cursor keys, then you can act on the block.

There are less-known ones too -- Ctrl+cursor left/right moves a word at a
time, for instance.

The subset that are relevant work in text-entry boxes in basically every
GUI as well.

With joy and relief, I let myself forget all that arcane 1980s nonsense and
relax into a standard interface.

Since the mid-1980s, all keyboards also broadly conform to the IBM Extended
layout, with cursor keys, Ins/Del, Home/End, PgUp/PgDn, etc. They *all*
have Ctrl and Alt. Some may have an Apple or Cmd or Windows key too, but
all have Ctrl and Alt.

It is nearly 30 years since standardisation prevailed.

I refuse to even attempt to use any editor that doesn't conform to this. I
don't care what advantages it has, I don't care how powerful it is. There
is a standard now. Use it. No excuses and no exceptions.

I don't have a Super key or a Meta key, and neither does anyone else,
because they stopped being on people keyboards when Lisp Machines went
away.

If the editor's help and tutorial and manuals refer to keys I don't have, I
ain't using it.

Time moves on. Standards change. There is a standard for text editors now.
I will gladly consider Emacs when it finally moves into 1985 and uses the
standard menus, the standard names for keys, the standard keystrokes, the
standard terms for "files" and "windows" and "clipboard" and so on.

If it doesn't, then it's a flat nope.

There have been attempts. I'm a rotten programmer but I'm tempted to try to
learn Emacs Lisp and do it myself, because I have heard that there's
functionality in there I would like. But I absolutely refuse to step back a
third of a century and use a non-standard UI. Life is too short.

--
Liam Proven b" Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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