Re: [Chicken-users] Re: any Windows Emacs haters here?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Reed Sheridan wrote:
> > From: "Brandon J. Van Every" <address@hidden>
> >
> >
> > But that's what's ridiculous about XEmacs.  It should be doing that
> > correctly out of the box.  I don't mean it doesn't indent the way I
> > want.  I mean it doesn't indent at all.  Throwing "a day" at things is
> > the whole mentality of Emacs that I think sucks.  It's forever broken,
> > there's always some new bit of the docs you've gotta futz with.  It's
> > just a big bloated ancient application with a lot of hair.
>
> You use C-j if you want to indent by default in emacs.  

Thank you for the help on that.  I suppose if I plugged myself into a 
forum of XEmacs users and asked questions, I might get farther.  I've 
found these sorts of things to be tedious to RTFM or Google about.  I 
object to the general culture of configurations, complications, delays, 
and keystroke memorabilia.  They've wasted a lot of my time.

> You can make
> return behave the same way by putting this in your .emacs:
> (global-set-key "\r" 'newline-and-indent).

Both XEmacs and SciTE have menu entries for editing your own 
configuration file.  Now, why has it been easier to configure SciTE, so 
far?  Perhaps because there's only 1 long web page for a help file.  
Perhaps because configuration is just setting a variable to some value, 
rather than being a more general-purpose coding interface.  Perhaps I 
just got lucky on my Google searching and the grass is greener on the 
other side of the fence.

> Your point is taken about the silly, inconvenient way that emacs works
> out of the box.  But you can just look at other people's .emacs and
> quickly find the common customizations that most people would want.

I dispute "quickly."  Too much Google time, generally speaking.

> http://www.dotfiles.com/index.php?app_id=6

I've bookmarked this, thanks.

> Once you get the common things working, which isn't too bad if you
> slurp customizations from other people, you can choose how much time
> you want to spend futzing with docs.  If you use Emacs like it was
> Microsoft Notepad, you'll never look at another doc.  If you become an
> elisp guru, you could spend your whole life messing with emacs.

CMake only required Notepad-like functionality.  C development requires 
more configuration.  Scheme-to-C, still more.

> > I've discovered Scintilla / SciTE.
>
> Everything you've mentioned wanting here (support for C++, first-class
> support for Scheme, and at least some support for CMake) are already
> available for Emacs.  I would be amazed if hacking 1 or 2 of those
> into  some other editor didn't take a hell of a lot longer than
> configuring Emacs.

Except that SciTE already has a large support community, support for 
many languages, etc.

> Sorry for the OT blathering,

I'm not!  "What editor should I use?" is a question that comes up over 
and over again.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every