Re: Successfully merged projects

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Apr-2011, Richard Crozier wrote:

| It is this kind of assumption which is the one of the reasons you think
| emacs is so simple, and I think it's so hard.

I don't see it that way.  I was aware that I was using jargon, but
decided that it would be insulting to tell you that the notation meant
a control character, or how to type a control character, based on the
fact that you seemed to have had some familiarity with trying Emacs in
the past.

| GNU emacs 21.4.1 is the version most easily available to me.

OK, that is pretty old by now.  I'm most interested in trying to
understand whether it is really difficult to start using Emacs for
simple tasks using the current Emacs, not a version that is about a
decade old now (seriously, even though 21.4 was released in 2005, the
21.x release series started in 2001).

| I have actually
| got it working when connecting from a different machine, but now another
| example of difficulty. I went to the help menu and clicked on 'show emacs
| version', and the info was displayed at the bottom. I wanted to use the info
| in this reply, so I thought I'd just copy and paste it, but clicking on the
| area where it appeared made the info disappear and I get the message
| 'Minibuffer window is not active'. This is not intuitive behaviour.

I agree that is not helpful.  When I try this with Emacs 23, it opens
up the *Messages* buffer showing the text from the minibuffer, from
which I can cut and paste.  So that problem has apparently been fixed.
It is still somewhat confusing in that you can't cut and pasted
directly from the minibuffer, but at least it doesn't give a cryptic
error message.

| But I don't just want to just enter text, I'm only learning to use it so I
| can use the Octave features! 
| 
| Another example, I choose 'open file' from the menu, I don't get a directory
| browser or anything like that,

Again, you are using a version that is very old now.  When I use the
open file button with Emacs 23 on my system, I get the usual gtk/gnome
file browser widget.

| I get a message saying 'find file: ~/' at the
| bottom. Now what should I do. Can I just type the file name and emacs will
| magically find the file in my system, or must I know by heart the directory
| location of the file? Can I navigate to a directory by typing some commands
| or something? I haven't a clue.

You have some familiarity with Unix systems, too, right?  So you
probably know what a filename looks like and that ~/ represents your
home directory?  Yes, you can just enter the filename.  TAB completion
works, so it is relatively quick to find files this way.  But yes, I
do understand the problem that if you have never seen a filename
written out before with slashes used to separate directory names, this
will be confusing.

| Another example, when I launch emacs I get the welcome screen with the logo.
| I click on this and get the next screen where there's a message:
| 
| ;;This buffer is for notes...  blah blah
| 
| I highlight the text to copy into this reply and right click to copy,
| assuming I'll get a context menu with an option to copy. I have to do this
| because I already know neither C-c or SHIFT+CTRL+c will copy as the key
| bindings are different. There is no context menu, so I give up. Oh, and what
| is a buffer? Of course I now know what a buffer is (I think), but seriously,
| does it have to be this hard?

The behavior is much different for Emacs 23.  The default startup
screen on my system looks similar to this:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/images/splash.png

though not the same since that image appears to be for a more recent
development version, but it is still quite similar.  Clicking on the
startup screen doesn't take me somewhere else unless I click on an
underlined word that functions like a link in a typical web browser.

| I use texniccentre for LaTeX, the matlab editor for m files, Visual Studio
| Express editions for windows .NET projects and debugging C++ mex files, I'm
| using the Qt Editor for QtOctave. For everything else I use ConTEXT. On
| Linux I usually use gedit.

Do these all have interfaces that are the same, or do you have to
remember which editor you are using in order to do the right thing?
Or are the "close enough" and you just have to remember the
differences, and you can do that because you are used to it, whereas I
would be infinitely frustrated by the (I'm guessing, many) little
inconsistencies?  Or does it not matter because you do everything with
the mouse by clicking menu items and icons?

| I didn't need any time to learn to use these tools, they were intuitive to
| use!

For you!

| There was no major investment in just getting started. Sure, this may
| be because of my previous experience

I'm sure it is because of previous experience.  Many of the little
icons on the typical Windows toolbar are completely meaningless to me.

| it's good to be able to get started
| without having to know any commands whatsoever.

And I think it is entirely possible to do that with current Emacs on a
modern system.

| I am sure I could replace all these editors with emacs, if I could just
| figure out how to open a file!

With modern Emacs, you can use the file browser.  Or you can use

  C-x f

or

  M-x find-file

I think the first step in having a better experience with Emacs would
be to get the current version.

In any case, I'm sure that everyone is tired of this sub thread by
now.  But really, I am interested in knowing how we can make things
easier to use.  It is surely not perfect, but I think the current
Emacs mostly does a good job with that.

jwe