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> On 27 Mar 2023, at 13:48, Giles Coochey <giles@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On 27/03/2023 13:36, Tom via list wrote: >> >> The problem is since the mouse came out I've not really used keystrokes much. The >> other problem is I used keystrokes on lots of different programs to do lots of >> different things and they've all come back to get in the way. Indeed emacs seems >> to have many many more features than it did in the eighties and I haven't got >> into the packages yet! I mostly used emacs for c/sed/awk/lex programming where >> I'd get it to do every test I could think of to make my C coding as error free as >> possible and to glue everything I could in my chip design work together so I >> could leave the computer to it while I dug out new stuff to try in the library. >> Its like going back to the house you grew up in only someone's rebuilt a lot of >> it and hung the doors the wrong way- seemingly familiar but you dont half bang >> your head a lot! >> >> > It's strange that we have fond recollections of using emacs 30 years ago (I used > it for pascal/fortran university programming courses, and mostly exclusively on a > Wyse text only terminal). It was very usable at the time and great for > auto-indenting code, syntax highlighting, etc.. etc.. > > Unfortunately, after an absence of use of at least 25 years - trying to go back to > it is a real pain, as we've all got use to using a GUI, remembering all those > keystrokes is somewhat cumbersome. I've since given up... It’ll come back to you? It’s like a language you learned but haven’t used for a long time? Your mind starts to engage again and it rebuilds quicker than learning anew? I’ve never understood using a WIMP (Windows-Icons-Mouse-Point) (only form of GUI in common use at mo.) when you can separate the information and its presentation. You can have huge documents and only have to keep the source and scripts which recreates all the graphs, the typeset document with all the graphs and things in it, etc. Run bzip2 on it and you have something tiny you can keep “for ever”. Else it’s still small anyway and leave it flat-text so you can “grep” for content - find things you did years ago. Two years ago on holiday getting winter sun I got a plea from for a favour and managed to solve a problem with GBP hundreds-of-millions riding on it, having fired-up a computer-numerical solution i have which runs inside emacs using its interpreter. It was there on my laptop’s storage and when I did a “find … -exec grep ...” I found it from years before and delivered an answer which left no further argument possible. There’s something rational about the approach. I’d say - to be recommended. Many “information and its presentation” solutions have the human and the computer meet halfway. The human learns a stylised way to “talk to” the computer, and the computer does exactly what the human instructs, that way being at a minimum overall comprehensible to the human. The effort with the Windows-Icons-Mouse-Point’s is to try to go all the way to the human making it “user-friendly”, and lots of insidious things go wrong in that vast complexity. Anyone knows where all that computing power goes? I do my finite element - again delivering solutions which sometimes smash all nonsense out of the way when GBP many millions are riding on it - on a computer I was given because it’s too ancient to be useful for current “office” software. The FEA program runs on Windows, so it has to be an MSWindows computer. And FEA is a vast computational thing. But it’s rational, so it runs on a computer with physical bits dropped-off, etc. which cannot browse most webpages. Suggest - to be recommended. Rich S -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/