Re: basic question: going back to dired

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 03:59, Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:

> Hehe. You see, I think you just proved my point.

Only if you're a newbie. :-)

> 2. Nobody has suggested changes which are not either a poor choice in
> the sense that they lose some of the significant meaning of what the
> object/action/function provides or are likely to increase confusion or
> are likely to become outdated or out of vogue even faster.

Agreed.

> 3. Making such changes is not a trivial task despite what Xah argues.

Of course. When he talks about "four hours" I'd say he's
underestimating the effort by two orders of magnitude...

> For example, we change the term
> buffer to workspace - do we also change all the functions with the name
> buffer in them to have the term workspace?

I already pointed out that there were more than 500 functions with
"[bB]uffer" in their names... It's sheer madness to think about
changing it, not only because of the work, but the impact to users and
package developers out there.

> I suspect that many of the features found in modern IDEs that
> are missing from emacs are actually a much bigger barrier to adoption -
> for example, *smart* dynamic completion or fontification based on
> semantics rather than syntax or improved font handling and antialiasing
> or updating of modes that handle mail, web, etc to support evolving
> technology better i.e. javascript support, extended interfaces better
> able to handle working with "the cloud" etc.

Agreed.

> To me, a lot of the arguments about terminology are a bit like people
> who meet someone they fall in love with and then start trying to change
> them to something else. All to often, this just ends in tears. Either
> they succeed in makinig the changes and then realise what they have is
> different to what originally attracted them or the person they are
> trying to change ends up no longer liking them either because they don't
> want to change or as a result of the change, now want something
> different.

Well, I don't agree with the analogy, because Emacs is by definition
THE customizable editor. My Emacs would surely turn your hair white,
and yours mine. That Is Good. Certainly I know that I strongly dislike
using a bare Emacs without my .emacs customizations (but I wouldn't
try to force them on anyone, of course).

  J