The Icicles Saga — A Tech Geeking Story
Xah Lee
I've heard Icicles mentioned few times a year since about 2006,
and the few times i tried to see what it is, spend 10 secs on the home
page, came away not knowing what it actually do, and left.
The incicle home page:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles
first, the name is not helping. What the fuck is “Icicles”?
Then, the page presents a extremely lousy logo, of a photograph of
icicles.
The opening sentence goes:
“This page and its linked pages describe Icicles, an Emacs library
that enhances minibuffer completion, that is, input completion. This
page lists the main Icicles features and presents entry points to all
of the Icicles doc.”.
So? What does it do?
Then, immediately following the first header of main features, you got
this sound byte:
«“In case you never heard of it, Icicles is to ‘TAB’ completion what
‘TAB’ completion is to typing things manually every time.” [1]»
So, what the fuck does it do? Why do i need to hear this sound byte?
It is followed up by a long list 15 items, each with emacs tech
jargons, technicalities, concepts, the like of input, match, cycle,
imenu, multi, fuzzy matching, regexp. Description of its generalities,
applications, and ends with “Have Fun”!
I don't want to fucking goddamn have fun. I want to spend 5 seconds to
know what it can do for me, and how to install the fucking shit.
Then, in the “Obtaining and Installing Icicles” section, you are
directed to another page, the icicles libraries file, at
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Libraries . You are told to
get these files, then come back to run the install commands.
On that page, it is filled with one hundred knobs and links, with
details about their relationships, requirement, optionality. Ok, so
how do install the goddamn icicles which i smelled seems to improve
command completion in a fancy way?
A minute on the page indicates that you probably need most of it. How
do i get them all? Ok, it list 4 fucking third party ways. WHAT A
MOTHER FUCK.
The first one, requires you to install icicles-install.el first. With
its own “simple installation instruction” fuck.
The second one, it talks about a shell script i need to install first.
Complete with thanks to whoever did it i don't need to fucking know.
The third option, is TWO zip files. Not one, but TWO. Why the fuck
TWO? I don't mother fucking know, but it says it might be out of date.
Fuck you.
The 4th option, bzr. What the fuck is bzr???
Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/
☄