Re: What's your favourite *under_publicized* editing feature ofEmacs?

[Cthun]

On 22/02/2011 9:33 PM, Rafe Kettler wrote:
> On Feb 22, 9:06 pm, Cthun<cthun_...@qmail.net.au>  wrote:
> > On 22/02/2011 2:47 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> >
> > > There seems to be a contradiction between those last two paragraphs.
> > > Saving buffers and finding files are relatively rare operations which
> > > thus shouldn't be given very easy to press key sequences like C-s and
> > > C-o.
> >
> > Where do you live where software never crashes and the electricity never
> > goes out? Most of us learn to save very frequently to limit how much
> > we'll have to do over again if the power goes out or whatever.
>
> Emacs is really, really stable. My computer hasn't crashed in the past
> 6 months, either. The power hasn't gone out in 3 months or so here
> (eastern US).
>
> Save and open are relatively infrequent command relative to others
> (actual typing, cursor movement, etc.).

Yeah, but for "actual typing" you only need the normal 
alphanumeric/symbol keys (no ctrl- or alt- combos) and for cursor 
movement, the arrow/home/end/etc. key group to the right of the main 
keyboard area. You've got loads and loads of ctrl-letter and ctrl-number 
combinations still after exhausting all of these more-frequent actions.

And then not everyone lives somewhere where the power is that reliable.

And then not everyone is daft enough not to fork their file before doing 
something truly drastic to it, especially large elisions.

And then, of course, there's the tendency of operating systems to 
blue-screen, laptops to overheat and hang, etc. no matter how stable the 
editor application is.