Re: info-find-source

[Emanuel Berg]

Robert Thorpe wrote:

> I think it's a mistake to over-emphasise the
> editing modes, and their keybindings.
> The viewing modes and the special modes are
> just as important.

They are as important (or unimportant
I suppose) as the editing modes, however at
least I spend only a fraction of my time there
so the fluency compared to editing is - well,
it hasn't reached the point where it can even
be called "fluency", in all honesty.

At the end of the day, editing and writing is
where the creativity is. Everything else is
support for that. (Support is important,
of course.)

> I spend a great deal of time in Dired, Info,
> Help and reading mail.

I also use Dired a lot. The creativity-support
model doesn't really apply to that tho as Dired
is about mucking around the file system. I find
the original bindings to Dired generally long
and out of place, and I have written a bunch of
other Dired related Elisp as well [1]. However that
was one of the first things I did with Emacs so
it is possible some of it was unneccessary if
the "mere" functionality is concerned.

Info is what this thread is all about.

Help I just look up a function or keystroke
with without really doing anything else. But it
has served me well. I don't get lost in it.

For reading mails I use Gnus and it doesn't
involve a lot of keys. Writing mails I consider
creative, only perhaps the need/desire to do
it seems to be greater when there is no other
project that really holds a strong appeal, so
it is more of an in-between pastime for me
personally. Undisputably, the whole FOSS
development movement is based on mails.

> I also spend a fair amount of time in View,
> Occur, Grep, Find, Compile and Shell.

Of those I'm aware of "Compile" if you mean the
compilation buffer. I never do anything there
tho. Shell I consider creative or perhaps in
the "Dired" category.

> In my experience it's worth becoming
> reasonably familiar with those modes and
> their keybindings. It's true that doing that
> means less practice with the normal
> editing keybindings.

Well, you don't really need MORE time there :)

[1] http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/dired-my.el

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