Re: [GD-General] Eiffel

[J C L. <cl...@ka...>]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2001 16:47:17 -0500 
Thatcher Ulrich <tu...@tu...> wrote:

> 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.  

FWLIW those things have been true for at least 6 years, and I think
closer to 8.

> It can go out to the 'net and edit files via ftp.  

Use TRAMP (tramp.el) and you can add SSH, rsh, rsync, and various
other transports to that, as well as the ability to bounce thru one
or more intermediate systems (eg a firewall) to get to the final
file.

> 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.  

Web searching also helps.  There's a very large raft of variously
home grown and third party elisp out there that works very nicely.  

  ObNote: I just found align-regexp.el (align regex matches
  vertically) and dict.el (a dict client) a few months ago, both of
  which have turned out to be very useful.

    ftp://ftp.kanga.nu/pub/users/claw/dot/xemacs/

> 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.  

Conversely, my approach is to make the tools adapt to me.  I'm the
human.  They're the machines.  Machines are there to do things for
me, not me for them.  I don't always succeed, and I regularly
backtrack and pick up the path the tool originally took instead, but
those are more issues with how my views and expectations grow rather
than of the approach or tools themselves.

This partially explains why my .xemacs is almost 14K lines.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
cl...@ka...               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.