3 Dec
2010
3 Dec
'10
2:41 p.m.
From: Liam Proven
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 6:47 PM
FTAOD: CUA =
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access
What I'd /really/ like as a writing tool would be
a CUA mode for
EMACS. I find its native UI bizarre and incomprehensible - if I have
to edit text at a Unix prompt, I use Vi, badly - but reading comments
like Neal Stephenson's in /In The Beginning Was The Command Line/
<http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html> make me think it might
be the ultimate writers' tool. I'm damned if I'm learning another new
set of keybindings [a] at my age and [b] in a world where CUA has
killed off everything else and now rules the GUI world.
You're apparently in luck. Starting with release 22.1, GNU Emacs includes
a cua-mode with appropriate keybindings, so that you don't have to do them
all yourself. (One of the beauties of the entire EMACS family of editors
is that you *can* do anything you want with key bindings. You don't have
to accept the defaults.)
I learned EMACS on TOPS-20 in 1978. I liked it so much that I studied the
TECO sources,[1] and came up with my own variant which I used for years.[2]
When GNU Emacs hit Stanford, at version 17.<mumble>, I immediately began
to use it under Ultrix on our VAXen at LOTS, and have continued to use it
through today. Some of the keybindings I use go back to my personalized
version of TECO EMACS.
I found the keybindings on MacWrite a little annoying, since my EMACS
fingers often tripped on them, but I've gotten used to Word in the last
few years (since my current employer uses Microsoft products as a corporate
standard). I still trip over <ESC> as "cancel" instead of
"Meta-", so I
type e-mail into an Emacs window on my Windows desktop, then cut-and-paste
into the Outlook window.
Because Emacs has continued to be supported and improved, I've never needed
to move to another editor. When I'm writing things for personal use, I use
Emacs on Mac OS X at home, and run them through TeX for formatting, usually
creating a PDF document in a single step. I don't need CUA, but it's there
for those who do.
[1] In fact, I posted a Y2K fix to the TIME library to the Emacs newsgroups
11 years ago. Both the original author of the library and RMS himself
were amazed and amused.
[2] Mostly a matter of moving selected functions from standard libraries
into my own, to save space. TECO EMACS has never been moved from its
original 256KW address space into the modern 1GW world of recent versions
of the PDP-10 and its OSes. Editor and document must all fit into the
cramped confines of a single memory section.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/