Re: .emacs poser

[Emanuel Berg]

Dale Snell <ddsnell@frontier.com> writes:

> That said, the only chord there is the C-x.  The rest
> are a sequence of keystrokes.

It doesn't matter. It is too many hits to do too
little.

> I can't speak for European keyboards.

The US layout is better for programming but those chars
are not as goofy as those you use. Semi-colon, and all
the brackets, are better placed on the US layout
keyboard, and for whatever language-specific chars you
need, there is the compose key.

Which by the way is another solution that I think is
much better than setting this up in Emacs.

> and the ever popular copyright (©), trademark (™),
> and registered trademark signs (®).

Serious?

> If I need anything more demanding, like en and em
> dashes, or primes instead of quotes, I'll fire up a
> text processor

A word processor? Like OpenOffice or Word?

> and go that way.  Of course, in a purely text forum,
> like this, someone would undoubtedly complain if I
> were to attach the entire message as a PDF.

Yes. PDF is for things to be *printed*, like manuals,
or scientific work with need for special notation.

> There are certain organizations that want their
> documents written in a certain format, which may
> include Pilcrow and Section marks, and other such
> things.  Happily, I don't deal with those.  (Again,
> I'd use LaTeX or Groff for that.)

Groff! Wow, you are a man (pun) of many surprises. Is
that used outside of the Unix manpages world?

LaTeX is great obviously. I would drop the word
processor and use Emacs (or Vim) + LaTeX.

> That's limiting yourself.  If you need accented
> characters, learn how to enter them in a general way,
> not just specific words.

It is not about *ability*, it is about *speed* and
*ergonomics* and *limiting the mental effort* when
doing a routine thing, as typing. To memorize and type
some four or five hit combination just to get a goofy
char that is (almost) never used doesn't make sense.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573