Re: [GD-General] Eiffel

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Dec 20, 2001 at 01:38 -0500, Kent Quirk wrote:
>
> And just to get in my shot...to me, using emacs is like asking for a car
> and being told "here's a pickup truck full of spare parts -- if it
> doesn't meet your needs, you can take it apart and rebuild it all by
> yourself!" I don't have time for that much freedom.

That's what I used to think, until I really made a commitment to learn
emacs.  These days emacs knows a lot, straight out of the box.  It
knows about RCS and CVS, it knows how to indent and highlight various
languages, how to run a build tool and bring you to the errors, how to
run a source-level debugger, how to auto-complete.  It's got rectangle
modes, outline modes, text modes, spell checkers, yadda yadda.  It can
go out to the 'net and edit files via ftp.  None of this stuff
requires any customization; you just have to dig a bit in the docs to
learn the existence of the feature, and the keybindings and/or command
names.  If you're on Windows, it also helps to get cygwin for some of
the default supporting tools (grep, cvs, ...).

I'm not really an emacs old-timer, so maybe this level of integration
is recent, or maybe it's always been there.  My general philosophy is
to *not* fiddle with my .emacs too much; instead upgrade my wetware --
learn the default keys & commands, and only customize if I really have
to.  Sure, the keybindings are not ideal and were designed by a crazy
person, but they work for touch-typing, and hey, I use a QWERTY
keyboard too.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich <tu...@tu...>
http://tulrich.com