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Re: like other editors


From: Rustom Mody
Subject: Re: like other editors
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:12:38 +0530

stan  wrote:
> The other topic is more about the cloning the MS windows gui standard 
> keystrokes into emacs. Are you and the other
> developers interested in moving to the windows cut and paste model and 
> keystrokes? Rhetorical.

Lets go ahead with the strawman argument:
According to 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_adoption#Measuring_desktop_adoption
gnu/linux may have more than 1% market share (!!) compared to Microsoft

So lets assume its 5% market share ie 1/20th

Now even if the density of emacs users is 5 times higher in the free
OSes as compared to MS, still the sheer number of MS-emacs users is 4
times higher than emacs users on free OSes.

Is this poll doing them justice? Or is it skewed?

So much for the strawman argument.

The more real argument:
Lets assume this change is adopted.
To restore old behavior would be probably one line in the init. [Could
some emacs-dev please supply this config detail?]

Alan's idea of emacsicality if handled with some imagination could
reduce this one line to zero.

Since I am writing this from a debian box let me spell out how it
would work for that.
It would work similarly for all other OSes (with package managers).

1. emacs adopts the concept of emacsicality (or personality if one is
allergic to cute names)
  To start with there are 3 emacsicalities 22,23 24. More fine grained
distinctions could be added as desired.

2. debian (and ubuntu and other apt based systems) have preconfig and
post config hooks for packages.
This can be used to detect whether emacs is on a fresh install path or
an upgrade path.

If its on an upgrade path
 the emacsicality is set to that of the older installation
If its fresh the emacsicality is set by the defaults the devs choose,
modifiable by the packagers choices.
[much like debian's gnome settings are different from ubuntu's]

Hopefully with this the old users will have zero cost to this (and
other forward looking changes).

And the rest of us who are living in 2011 can adapt to the present
rather than complaining that elevator doors should be redesigned for
cravats and swords to not get stuck.



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