Emacs and Ergo Feedback

[Shenli]

Emacs and Ergo Feedback

Hi Xah and David,

Xah, I have read some of your articles. Most of them are interesting
and
informative. In "Text Editors Popularity", you have produced a
list. There are my 2 cent about editors in a developing country,
China, and especially, in Shanghai.

I myself have used lot of editors, and asked other people about
editor, from university to company. As you know, editor is the one I
have to face to every day. So I want to choose a kind and "popular"
one. I can say, UltraEdit (you didn't mention it in your article) and
VI dominate the Win32 and Unix market respectively around me.
Dominate means
take above 80% market share, and companies are willing to pay for a
multi-user licence.

Ultraedit is popular for its friendly environment[1]. Some guys
(e.g. me) even copy code from Unix to Win32 just for using Ultraedit
to edit and view file. As for VI, just for its key bindings, nothing
else. Personally, I hate VI.

A little about Emacs. It is "Jude the Obscure". But after I use it, I
become to understand why there is a kind of film called cult film.
EMACS IS THE CULT EDITOR IN MY HEART NOW. But it's default complex
key-binding and ugly UI give user a very bad first impression. I even
think
Emacs develop team should give these two tasks highest priority. It's
similar to dating girl. Boys(e.g. me) won't give ugly girls the
second chance,
even she is "Jane Eyre".

BTW, I have been using your ErgoEmacs 5.0 (Emacs 23.1) for about half
a month. It works very
well. Something I am dreamed of now come to reality.
There are some suggestions, maybe helpful to you.
1. Use C-c/C-x/C-v but not Alt, for they are default in almost every
one's heart, Ergo may change all expect the three.
2. Keep C-/ for dabbrev-expand completion.
3. In isearch-moode, change isearch-yank-kill to C-v, or in your
convention, M-v
4. Add redo.el and pre-compile all the el file.
5. There is a error when I compile and load unbind.el.

Ultraedit feature list:
http://www.ultraedit.com/products/ultraedit/ultraedit_features.html

Thanks,
Shenli

[Xah Lee]

Hi Shenli,

thank you very much for the valuable info.

I've update my page about your new comment.

• Text Editors Popularity

  http://xahlee.org/emacs/text_editor_trends.html

> There are some suggestions, maybe helpful to you.

> 1. Use C-c/C-x/C-v but not Alt, for they are default in almost every

>   one's heart, Ergo may change all expect the three.

The Ctrl+ c x v works in ErgoEmacs though.

> 2. Keep C-/ for dabbrev-expand completion.

thanks. David also suggested that dabbrev-expand is very important. We should add it. Currently, we are thinking combining the dabbrev-expand function with keyword completion, so there's just one command that expands words in a programing lang mode... as to the key spot, we had Alt+t, but possibly that will change...

> 3. In isearch-moode, change isearch-yank-kill to C-v

>   convention, M-v

Yeah, good idea. I noticed this is a faq in emacs community. Since we do support both C-v and M-v, we'll have both. I'll add a issue.

> 4. Add redo.el and pre-compile all the el file.

If you are using the ErgoEmacs binary for Windows v1.6.1, both of these are done out of the box.

For just ErgoEmacs package, pre-compile may be a problem because it won't work for those using emacs 22. Adding redo into the package also may be a problem since it is separate package...

anyhow, still, thanks for your comment.

> 5. There is a error when I compile and load unbind.el.

Can you give detail? What version of emacs you are using? (call the emacs command “version”). Also, what error?

If you have some time, could you add a issue?

http://code.google.com/p/ergoemacs/issues/list

that'd be much appreciated, if you can.

> Ultraedit feature list:

> http://www.ultraedit.com/products/ultraedit/ultraedit_features.html

Thanks for the url. It'll be useful for reference at least for me when i need it.

 Xah

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