Re: Successfully merged projects

[John W. Eaton]

On 11-Apr-2011, Richard Crozier wrote:

| What's M-x? How do I do that, and what's supposed to happen? Is that holding
| down the M key then pressing x then tying in the words help-with-tutorial?
| Do i have to hold down M the whole time? Does it mean shift+M? Do I press
| enter at the end?

I assumed you had some basic knowledge of this notation, so I did not
tell you to "hold down the control key, then while still doing that,
simultaneously press the h key, then release both, then type t".  I
thought that would be insulting if you already understood what the
notation meant.

I also did give you the alternative of requesting the tutorial using
the menu.

| It also doesn't help that we use the NX client to connect remotely to the
| linux machines at work, and this seems to crash emacs, possibly related to
| fonts or something. 

OK, are we talking about a recent GNU Emacs (say 23.x) or something
else?

| Xemacs does work so I've just started that to remind myself of what the big
| deal is. When I selected tutorial from the menu I got a message at the
| bottom saying do I want to copy some file ./.xemacs/ or something yes or no?

XEmacs is a completely different thing by now.  I'm talking about what
the default experience would be for someone familiar with text editing
who starts a recent version of GNU Emacs on a modern system.

| this time the tutorial opened. The tutorial makes sense, but there's a lot
| of new terminology to learn, a lot of new keystrokes. I have to 'yank' and
| 'kill' instead of cut and paste for instance. 

OK, those are certainly valid points.

| At this point I think, I don't care how good it is, it's not worth the
| feeling of, 'will this really really ever pay off?' At some point you start
| to think, will my PhD supervisor/boss appreciate the time I'm spending on
| this, or would he rather I just made do with something else and did some
| actual work? I could have finished off that thermal simulation by now
| instead of reading this tutorial!

The tutorial will get you from the absolute basics to being able to
use Emacs fairly well.  It explains the terminology of C-x and M-x.  I
asked about it because I wondered if you had gotten this background
information, or if you were confused because you had not seen it.

But even without that, you can still use a recent version of GNU Emacs
on a modern system to edit a file at least as well as using Notepad or
pico, I think.  You don't need any control keys or meta commands to
enter text and save it to a file, or to open an existing file and edit
it and save it.  You can use the mouse and arrow keys to move around
and entering text just works.

| So that's what's difficult about emacs. I don't want a new way of working
| with computers, I just want to debug some octave code.

Well, I can tell you that I think the investment will pay off, and
that learning it is worth it.

What about the time spent learning other tools?  Is it worth it?  How
do you know in advance?

What program do you use for editing text files?

jwe