Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!rochester!bbn!jr@bbn.com From: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson) Newsgroups: comp.emacs Subject: Re: assorted questions Message-ID: <30011@bbn.COM> Date: 23 Sep 88 14:16:45 GMT References:<1423.590955666@pizza> <38609@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Sender: news@bbn.COM Reply-To: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson) Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge MA Lines: 33 In-reply-to: spolsky-avram@CS.YALE.EDU (Joel Spolsky) In article <38609@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>, spolsky-avram@CS (Joel Spolsky) writes [about (previous-line) and (scroll-down)]: >On my terminal >they're attached to (cursor up) and (page up), why shouldn't they >behave like every other word processor in existance? Okay, okay, sorry I started this. Look, GNU (and other) emacses' BIG win is that if you don't like how it does something, you can change it! Try that with your wordstar. I think someone even wrote a wordstar.el. Would you like to own up? As to "fixes" proposed in this discussion, they ain't. This is religion, folks; there's no right and wrong. Emacs predates "word processors" by a goodly number of years. Those who have lived with (ITS/Bottoms20/GNU) emacses all these years appreciate the consistency they have shown in pritnear all of the default behaviors. The growing body of smart packages to go with are that much more sugar. Maybe the problem is that rigid word procesors made for rigid habits, and since they were for-money products with lean support staff and no friendly user community to improve them, people got their features, and bugs, wired into their fingers. I like Dijkstra's quote about how microprocessors set the art of computer programming back about 20 years. I am tempted to say the same thing about "word processors" and editors. But I won't. Diving for the asbestos... -- /jr jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr