Re: Is Emacs on Aqua crippleware or is it just broken?

[BK]

tristero <tristero@waste.net> wrote ...

> The carbon emacs port can use either Option or Command as meta;
> whichever one isn't Meta becomes Alt.  It's configured by the variable
> mac-command-key-is-meta.  At one point the default value of this
> variable was t.  I set it to nil explicitly in ~/.emacs so that the
> behavior matches emacs in an osx Terminal and also in X11 (with a
> sensible .xmodmap): in my environment all three use Option for meta (I
> never use Alt in emacs).

Thank you. This looks like something constructive can come out of it.
As I mentioned, I have reason to believe that on the Emacs I use Cmd
is used as META because Cmd-x produces <M-x> (one of the few keyboard
shortcuts that do work).

Now, considering that I intend to put this all down in a step-by-step
guide for ILISP newbies, it will quite obviously have the effect of a
recommendation if it says something like "do this and this to make
Option your META key".

Therefore, before I ask you how to do this, let me first ask you
whether you believe that making Option to become META is a good thing
to recommend to people who are less interested in Emacs, but whose
main objective is to set up an IDE to either study or work in Lisp?
Also, people who will need that guide are probably inexperienced.
Someone who has been using Emacs on another platform before and knows
his way around is unlikely to need a someone like myself to tell him
how to set up Emacs with ILISP.

So, considering the target audience, is it a reasonable recommendation
to make Option to become META?

If so, the next question is how exactly do you do it? What is the
command that goes into ~/.emacs ? Further, as there are various things
in ~/.ilisp, what do I need to look out for to make sure there is no
side effect on ILISP? By that I mean how can I check that making
Option to become META will not break some keyboard related command
within ~/.ilisp ? Or is there no danger of that?


> As for the carbon port not matching Aqua conventions, it's hard to
> know what to say. The carbon port is functionally outstanding; it
> deserves nothing but praise imo.  The OP's contention that the lack of
> predefined support for Cmd-q makes this "crippleware" or "broken" is
> truly an amazing feat of pettiness, even for usenet.

You read something into my post that clearly isn't there. I didn't say
that not adhering to Apple keyboard shortcuts make Emacs crippled or
broken. What I said was that (a) not having *any* pasting method
(neither Mac nor Emacs methods) working; *plus* (b) not having *any*
quit-application method (neither Mac nor Emacs methods) *plus* (c) not
having the majority of Emacs keyboard shortcuts work, all of that make
it either crippled or broken.

The fact of the matter is that I cannot do any pasting, no matter what
method I use. As other versions of Emacs do support pasting, the
absence of pasting in the Aqua version would indeed make it crippled
in relation to other Emacs versions if this was intentional.

Likewise, I cannot quit Emacs other than by forcing it (kill -9). As
other versions of Emacs do support quitting the application, the
absence of quitting in the Aqua version of Emacs would indeed make it
crippled in relation to other Emacs versions if this was intentional.

But even then, I gave Emacs the benefit of doubt and I did not call it
crippleware. I said it did "exhibit severe symptoms of crippleware".
Then I described each observation and for each observation I asked
whether this was supposed to be that way (feature) or not (bug). I
know many people don't read thoroughly enough and only pick up a few
words, but that is hardly my fault.

The only thing you can accuse me of is that I said "excuse for an
editor" which was in the context of being nitpicked and flamed. If
there are any Emacs Aqua developers who take offense by that
heat-of-the-moment statement, then I apologise for that, but anything
else I said was fair and just.

rgds
bk