Re: Wholesome choice?

In <gj5vmv$mqq$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Ben Yalow <ybmcu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Having to constantly move one's hands off the keyboard would make
editing painfully slow. Also, how many commands can really be
stuffed into one mouse?

Except that it isn't particularly slow in practice, which means that
a thoery that claims it is is probably unsound.

Has anyone really run a test, and pitted several experienced Microsoft
Word users against several experienced Emacs users at typical editing
tasks?

It depends on what you mean by "typical editing tasks". I need my editor
to be able to produce tolerable formatting for Usenet messages. Or read
any format file that anyone sends me, in any format ranging from old
Wordstar formats through the latest Word formats. Or format a document
including graphics, wrapping appropriately around the graphics. Or
properly format characters around a dropped multiline cap. Or change the
tracking on the character spacing so that I don't have more than two lines
in a row (or more than a few in a paragraph) that end with hyphens due to
splitting words.

And one editor isn't the best fit for all of those tasks. But I need to
be able to all of them. So I have lots of editors on my machines, so that
I can use one that's appropriate for the task.

I'll note that I am usually the highest-volume poster here, even
though I only post on evenings and weekends. And that my posts are
always immaculately formatted, unlike those of nearly everyone else.
Most posters seem utterly incapable of re-wrapping quoted text that
has alternate long and short lines, for instance.

On the other hand, your newsreader/editor combination seems incapable of
understanding quoted-printable, even though the MIME headers specifically
state how the text is formatted. And that's a simple task that any
non-broken reader should be able to handle.

And, if the character set is appropriately listed in the headers, it
should be able to handle pretty much any character set that you throw at
it, and render them properly. Emacs doesn't have much support for
embedded fonts.

It's a perfectly fine editor for the limited number of things it can do.
But it can't do many of the things I need an editor for.


And several hundred commands are typically stuffed into a mouse,
when you include submenus, checkboxes, etc.

Navigating through multiple levels of icons and menus is *very* slow
compared to simply typing. In Emacs, even the most complicated
commands are just typing.

So customize the menus so that the commands you want get called out more
easily.

I *know* I don't know *all* the things I can do with any of the text
editors/word processors on my system, and I use several of them
hundreds of times a day.

I believe I do know pretty much all the things I can do in Emacs
-- well over a thousand commands, and the ability to build more.
Learning it takes time, but unless you intend to spend less than a
hundred hours over your entire lifetime editing text, it's worth the
investment of time.

And with all thousand commands, it still can't do things I've asked my
editors to do. Which is why I don't have just one editor.

Of course it would make little sense to learn several such editors and
switch between them hundreds of times a day. That would be as silly
as having both a QWERTY and a Dvorak keyboard, and switching randomly
from one to the other every few minutes, or posting here not just in
English, but switching randomly between Japanese, Swahili, Sioux, and
Lithuanian, expecting every poster and every reader to be fluent in
all of these languages.

You don't switch randomly. You switch to whatever editor works best for
the tasks that you're working on at the moment. If you need to do
something else, then you switch to an editor that's more appropriate for
that job.

--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.

Ben
--
Ben Yalow ybmcu@xxxxxxxxx
Not speaking for anybody
.

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