Re: Great SWT Program

On Jan 2, 2:17 pm, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
[snip]

Error: post too long. Do not post anything over 100 lines again.

But mine HAS to be. Yours could be much shorter.

Certainly, since I don't have an obsession about these things

OK. Either prove it by shutting up or admit that you're lying. If you
post anything exceeding 100 lines either in response to this post, or
dated after any response you make to this post or to any post I posted
on or after Jan. 5, 2008, I will announce that you were indeed lying,
loudly and publicly, and make reference to this King of all Lies of
yours in every subsequent response to any post of yours by referring
to you as the King of all Liars. Your credibility will of course go
directly into the toilet. No, wait, it's already there. It will get
FLUSHED DOWN the fucking toilet.

In fact, yours could
be nonexistent and it wouldn't cost you anything.

[nasty viciousness deleted]

Your sociopathic amusement at other peoples' expense is not
legitimate. If you lose such amusement, tough ***.

Perhaps if you greased it, your shift key would pop back out
immediately upon release.

He said, apropos of nothing.

Sure they are. But I never said I need those from my text editor.

You said the text editor should make use of the full capabilities of
modern graphics hardware, which includes the above. [insult deleted]

I also explained that by "modern" I meant, in that context, anything
widespread since about 1995 or so.

Also, none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

Just
a text editor where I can actually see what the *** I'm doing and
navigate around decently.

[insults deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

I don't, of course, except when professional needs necessitate it.

Which apparently is all the time.

No, only very occassionally.

Yet you end every single post with "powered by emacs". It certainly
sounds like you use it, if not "all the time", then at least more
often than "very occasionally". (Note spelling.)

What kind of profession, by the way,
insists on nobody modernizing?

[irrelevancies deleted]

Hrm, no answer. OK. Point: Twisted.

No, only the mini-buffer, if permanently displayed even when not in
use.

Much like the status bar in modern GUI software.

The status bar is in use whenever it has salient information
displayed. It's more comparable to the emacs status bar than to the
emacs mini-buffer, buffoon.

The status bar, by its nature, is always in use, and in modern
applications, toolbars and menu bars need to be accessible at any
time. The title bar on a modern app is arguably dispensible, but it
provides a useful orienting cue as well as a convenient handle to grab
the window by

You can't actually grab windows by the status bar in Windows apps and
then do anything useful with them.

He said, apropos of nothing.

I had of course been discussing grabbing windows by the title bar.
Just because emacs misuses its status bar to double as a title bar of
sorts does not mean modern applications do so.

Fortunately, Google Groups will, as always, put the lie to your
attempts to rewrite history and distance yourself from claims you made
that now embarrass you.

[calls me a liar and further insults me]

How predictable. But none of the nasty things that you have said or
implied about me are at all true.

Do a telephone poll of random middle-class Americans if you don't
believe me.

[false accusation of dishonesty deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

The user of a text editor does want enter to insert a newline.

Often, perhaps, but not always.

YES, ALWAYS. Except for a handful of nutters like you -- a drop in an
ocean of tens or even hundreds of millions of people.

This
follows almost directly from the definition of "text editor" for
chrissake.

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

Most of them, of course, will have no trouble absorbing the emacs
training even if they /don't/ have any previous emacs experience.

Of course they will.

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

It's completely alien to every kind of UI
standard

Of course not - it is only slightly different than the Windows UI.

*sputter* Baloney! Poppy***! Balloonjuice! BULL***!!

I've seen some whoppers in my time, but this ... why in God's name
even try, when nobody who has spent so much as five seconds fiddling
with trying to copy and paste in emacs is going to fail to see that
for exactly the crock of *** that it is?

Ouchies.

[implied insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

This is what would happen if you *succeeded* and they became
proficient with emacs, resulting in everything that ISN'T emacs
becoming hard for them to use, because of course only one of emacs and
everything else can be easy to use at a time.

There is, of course, nothing to prevent a proficient emacs user from
using other Windows apps.

Aside from that they will, as you and blmblm do, find them awkward to
use afterward, the same way they found emacs awkward to use
beforehand.

As you have said many times yourself,
Windows apps are remarkably easy to learn for the most part.

It's emacs that isn't. And equally hard to *un*learn, no doubt.

The smart choice there, of course, is always going to be "everything
else".

[insult deleted]

Impossible. Besides, none of the nasty things that you have said or
implied about me are at all true.

We are not discussing MDI indicators here. That was in another thread.

[insults deleted]

You lie! None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about
me are at all true.

And I have repeatedly pointed out, ever since this thread began, that
the very notion of a text editor requiring training to use is
ludicrous.

Of course not.

Of course yes. It's exactly as ludicrous as a hammer, as in the little
thing with a wooden handle and a funny-shaped metal head used for
hitting nails or removing them, requiring extensive training. Given
lots of perfectly adequate normal hammers and one weird one that can
do the job as well but requires all kinds of extra complicated
training to learn to use, after which your brain's so gummed up that
normal hammers AND screwdrivers, saws, and other such tools are now
all awkward and difficult to use, any carpenter who values his time
and sanity is going to stick with normal hammers.

What if your TV came with a remote control that had a 600
page manual and required special training to use?

I am sure professionals in TV stations have /exactly/ these sort of
sets around.

Doubtful. They probably have a nice slick modern computer interface,
except for small stations with poor budgets, which will have a bunch
of VCRs and tapes and some kooky filing scheme for the latter, plus a
cable-splitter with an eight-way switch somewhere. :P

Would you like it if
your kid's trike came with a 400-page manual and handlebars covered
with more controls than in the Space Shuttle cockpit?

[irrelevant insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

Would you prefer
a normal iPod or an mp3 player with forty thousand knobs and switches
but no obvious "play", "pause", "next track", or "previous track"
buttons?

Sound studio professionals do not tend to use mp3 as source streams,
so [insult deleted]

I didn't say anything about sound studio professionals, idiot. I was
discussing users of mp3 players.

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

That is not my claim, of course.

It was.

[calls me a liar]

You're the liar, and none of the nasty things that you have said or
implied about me are at all true.

I DO NOT. Stop putting words in my mouth, you lying little prick.

[puts words in my mouth and lies about me]

You lie! None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about
me are at all true.

User friendliness is ADHERING TO THE FUCKING STANDARDS NEARLY EVERY
OTHER APP IN EXISTENCE DOES.

No, user friendliness is presenting a convenient user interface to the
user.

Same fucking thing, moron.

Cite 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality

Pay especial attention to the section "The User's Perspective". In
particular:

* Is the user interface intuitive?
* Is it easy to perform easy operations?
* Does the software give sensible error messages?
* Do widgets behave as expected?
* Is the software well documented?
* Is the user interface self-explanatory/ self-documenting?

Notice that those are six of the eight points in the original. Emacs
fails on every count, of course. Most "old-school" unix software fails
on at least the "sensible error messages", "self-documenting", and
"easy to perform easy operations" counts. Most Windows ports of unix
software, particularly originally-non-graphical such software, fails
on "do widgets behave as expected".

Next is http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html -- here's how
to screw up usability even when slapping a graphical front end onto a
unix tool. Happens all too often.

There's also http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ and the Unix Hater's
Handbook and a whole host of other references that agree with my more
general points and, fairly often, specifically with my criticisms of
emacs and/or my criticisms of vi.

If you're going to continue to attack me, denigrate me, call me names,
and viciously slander me for disliking emacs and publicly explaining
why, then you have similar bones to pick with Wikipedia, notable
hacker ESR, a fairly successful businessman who's made his name and
his fortune identifying usability flaws in software UIs, and several
other reputable and reliable sources. (And nevermind that ESR himself
seems like the emacs-using type -- I very much doubt he'd dare to
brazenly recommend it to "anyone who edits text a lot". In fact he
probably realizes it's becoming obsolete, replaced by powerful,
specialized tools with modern UIs that adhere to modern standards like
CUA and modern standards of selection semantics and other such
behavior. Eclipse and other modern language-semantics-aware IDEs,
modern dedicated programmer's text editors, and so forth.)

Lying about where the insertion point
really is and crap like that certainly does NOT qualify as "user
friendly".

[insult deleted]emacs doesn't lie to the user

I've pointed out several situations in which emacs' behavior will
mislead any normal computer user who tries to use it. (Experienced
emacs users will know about the gotchas and won't be fooled, but this
does not matter when you've been recommending that a much larger
audience of lay computer users take up emacs.)

Also, none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

In fact no archaic box of text glowing green on a black
background like it's the 1970s is "user friendly". :P

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

(Funny how nostalgia buffs in the computer field always seem to favor
stuff from that particular era. It's never earlier, e.g. punched cards
or toggling everything in manually after each reboot, for some reason,
and never later, like old-skool Windows 3.x era stuff, either. I
wonder why?)

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

(Something having been tweaked since then is irrelevant; it's the era
of origination. The only modern stuff with origins that old seem to be
the mouse and keyboard. Modern UI paradigms seem to date back to the
late 80s or so.)

The only advantage it ever had over Notepad was a larger file size
limit that 64K, and Notepad hasn't had that limit for years, since *at
least* the debut of Windoze XP. :P

Plus, of course, the several thousand other features it has and
notepad lacks.

Features that fall into five broad categories:
* Of no practical use (unless you're really concerned about that Mayan
doomsday clock counting down);
* IDE-type features (use something designed for the job, like
NetBeans);
* Features for dealing with tabular data or other oddly-formatted,
non-
code data (use something designed for that job, like a spread***);
* Features totally orthogonal to text editing, such as NNTP client
functionality (use a real newsreader or whatever); and
* Features emacs users use for generic text editing tasks but which
are
obsolete in a modern UI, the larger goal of the user being served by
scrollbar, a mouse action, the clipboard, or similarly instead
(learn to use the modern replacement for the archaic interaction
method).

If I want something more powerful than Notepad, I will use any of
several editors that are more powerful than Notepad and have just as
easy to use UIs.

Such as emacs :-)

No. Emacs lacks a "just as easy to use UI". Enter, esc, and backspace
all act wonky, selections behave oddly, the graphical versions aren't
wholly in the 21st century with e.g. crufty text-mode-style prompts
still used liberally in lieu of proper dialog boxes, and so forth.

If I need a regexp search I've got a programmer-oriented editor, with
a normal GUI and adhering to all Windows UI norms, that has such a
feature.

Certainly, you can probably obtain and run 100+ different applications
each with its own narrow focus, and then alt-tab between them in order
to obtain something reminiscent to the power of emacs. I have no doubt
of this. Meanwhile, I have this in one single convenient package.

Certainly, you can throw everything but the kitchen sink into one big
steaming pile and have a bloated feeping creature. Meanwhile, I can
install only what I need in the way of tools narrowly specialized for
specific tasks, masters of one trade instead of jacks of all. With a
nice modern standards-compliant UI on each.

(Why on Earth would I need to alt-tab between them all? If I'm doing
job X I'll use the tool optimized for job X. If I'm later doing job Y
I'll use the tool optimized for job Y. When doing job X I won't mind
the lack of "job Y features" in the "job X tool", and vice versa.)

I have no use for emacs

Of course you don't - you don't actually edit text a lot.

Actually, I do.

find yourself some useful, modern tools to take the
place of emacs.

If there was one, I would certainly investigate it. As it is, however,
emacs is the only alternative out there.

In Bent-world. Meanwhile, in the real world, Eclipse development
continues apace, there are rumours of a new version of NetBeans in the
works, and all sorts of other tools -- spreadsheets, newsreaders,
various-featured text editors, word processors, and so forth -- are
waiting out there for those with the Google-fu to find them.

Or keep using emacs if you really prefer to, but stop telling everyone
else that they should turn their clocks back three decades and use
that old hunk of junk instead of the modern tools they currently are
very productive with.

[calls me a liar]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

No, normal people actually /understand/ this after [misquotes me]

Do not misquote me again. Your post contained lines prefixed with ">"
that did not occur in the post that you followed up to nor summarize
ones that did. That is incorrect. Stop being dishonest.

Exactly.

Ah, a breakthrough at last.

I agreed that normal people need special-purpose training to use your
crap.

Stop sneakily putting words in my mouth by dishonestly editing the
quoted material, fucktard. I've gotten mighty sick of Andreass, Arse
Vajhøle, and Tristram Ralph dishonestly editing quoted material in
ways other than trimming and summarizing it (generally by actually
adding quoted material in by hand), thereby lying about what I said,
or about what I quoted others as having said. Don't YOU start.

("All of half a minute"? Bull***. Earlier you said it takes two weeks
and I'm quite sure it actually takes quite a bit longer with anyone
whose level of IT skill is only normal.)

[insults deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

If what you're implying is true, it just means that M$ fucked up Vista
even worse than I originally suspected. Although I'd thought that
applications are, in Vista, still displayed in distinct and easily
identifiable windows much as they have been in every Windows since at
least as far back as 3.1 up until XP?

Professional users seem to think otherwise. Apparently, Microsoft have
introduced some new paradigms to account for the plethora of functions
("creeping featurism" in Twisted-speak) in their applications and
these new paradigms take some time to learn - just as the old Windows
paradigms do.

Surely not two whole weeks, but it does sound like they may indeed
have gummed up Vista something fierce. Not that it matters much. If MS
wants to make an emacs out of Vista, it's their funeral (well, the
corporate equivalent, Chapter 11 looming on the horizon, anyway). :P
(Wouldn't that be a sight to see? Microsoft going into receivership!
Might even happen within our lifetimes after all if you're right about
how badly they've screwed the Vista pooch.)

No, they will do very strange and wonky things.

Strange and wonky to you

Strange and wonky to any of the tens of millions of people (perhaps
even hundreds of millions) that fall under your broad criteria for
people you think will benefit from emacs.

[implied insult deleted]

No. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

Some of them are,
perhaps, also useful things, but useful things that some other key
should be doing instead so that backspace or whatever can be free to
do as God intended. :P

[insults deleted; nothing of substance said about the above]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

(Picking on my choice of metaphors while ignoring the gist of what I
said is a sure sign of the desperation of a born loser about to lose
again. It should be some consolation though that you've lost to the
best of the best, a genius-IQ grandmaster of this particular variety
of argument-fu. :P)

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

I never said that. But they might as well be, for all they behave
unpredictably in ways that depend on complex and counterintuitive
factors that in any NORMAL application would not be relevant.

Complex and counterintuitive to you perhaps

To any of those hundreds of millions of people.

More terminology-quibbling. And wholly irrelevant.

[implied insult deleted]

No. And none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about
me are at all true.

As far as the end-user is concerned, there is no distinction between
one text document and another

Of course there is. One may be his shopping list while the other might
be a Java source file. Clearly he is concerned about the difference.

A distinction in his use of it, but no distinction in WHAT IT IS as
far as the editor is concerned: a text file. He expects a compiler to
treat valid source differently from a shopping list. He expects the
jpeg decoder to understand neither. He expects Notepad or any other
text editor to treat them similarly, even if perhaps providing some
sort of syntax highlighting or other features when it detects a Java
source file. He most certainly does not expect his text editor to bind
keys like enter differently for some of them, or any of the other
basic text-input keys or basic navigation/editing keys.

-- they are all (or, at least, *should*
all be) the same as far as the software is concerned because anything
else is confusing and unpredictable.

Except when it isn't. Such as in emacs.

In other words, emacs violates the Principle of Least Astonishment.
Capitulation on that point noted for the record.

Of course you seem to take an authoritarian view that whatever the
software does is automatically correct, and automatically standards-
compliant, because correct is defined to be what the software does and
the software's behavior is considered standard by definition, even if
it's a "standard" adhered to by only the one piece of software, or
even only adhered to by that one piece part-time.

I, of course, take a user-centered view and prefer software that does
not force the user to "think different" and contort himself to jump
through its hoops, nor gives users any "my way or the highway"
attitude. I prefer software that works with the user, is as easy as
possible for the user to learn and use, adheres to all applicable de-
facto UI-behavior standards, and adheres to the Principle of Least
Astonishment. Such software is unfortunately somewhat rare. Most MS
software has some violations, and some cases of "my way or the
highway" type behavior. On the unix side, fragmentary-to-nonexistent
UI standards and a "users must learn all this complex techie stuff
just to understand the docs for this text editor" type attitude tends
to cause trouble.

There is certainly no distinction
between "buffers" and "documents".

There most certainly is.

Not.

They opened a text editor. They
opened something in the text editor.

In the case of grep, they didn't "open something in the text editor".

Except that they did. Users don't care where it came from. They did
something that made the text editor sprout a new window with
particular content. That's "opening something in the text editor",
even if indirectly. Whether the command they did to trigger it was
"file->open" or some other command.

Now they have a block of text
displayed in the main part of the text editor. They expect such a
block of text in the main part of a text editor to behave in a certain
way.

[snip utter nonsense]

No. They expect hitting enter in the block of text in the main part of
a text editor to insert a newline. Everyone in the fucking world does,
except for a) people who have never even used a text editor and b)
nutters like you who were warped by your earliest experiences of text
editors having been with crufty ancient wonky ones.

If it does not, it will upset them.

Which is exactly why emacs does this.

But it doesn't. In fact, it only *sometimes* doesn't, which is
actually worse.

If it *sometimes* does and
*sometimes* does not, it will upset them more.

And emacs is very consistent about this, of course.

Of course it's not. It's *deterministic*, and in principle
*predictable* (given extensive training), but that's not the same
thing as *consistent*, not by a long shot.

If there is some arcane
rule by which what happens can in principle be predicted from the
source of the text, the phase of the moon, and the price of tea in
China

[irrelevant quibbling over hypothetical details deleted]

Always, when confronted by a logically-unassailable argument, Bent
either does this or resorts to a pure ad-hominem argumentation style.

, they will not be appeased -- they want simple and very
predictable, consistent behavior, such as "enter always inserts a
newline at the insertion point in the big block of text inside of a
text editor".

[snip some implied insults and irrelevancies about "IT
professionals"]

The discussion is scoped to "everyone who edits text much", remember?

And none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

Two weeks of training, or had you forgotten already?

[insults and nonsense deleted]

Stop putting words in my mouth and stop lying. None of the nasty
things that you have said or implied about me are at all true.

THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS!

So why do you keep doing it?

NO. IT'S WHAT *YOU*'RE DOING THAT IS RIDICULOUS, FUCKWAD!

A single application doing everything differently from ANY OTHER APP
ON EARTH is not at all "standard"!

It doesn't, of course, do "everything differently from any other app
on Earth".

Except that it does. Well, *almost* everything.

In the case of text editors, this means that it pretty much has to do
anything that Notepad does the way that Notepad does it

Sorry, but Notepad doesn't define "the text editor standards".

I never claimed that it does. It does, however, exemplify the text
editor standards. And through sheer market share helps establish de-
facto standards.

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

There is *nothing at all* that is remotely "standard" about emacs. It
does not even have *internal* consistency

[calls me a liar]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

(See half my posts to this thread for discussions of emacs' lack of
internal consistency.)

Bollocks! Even such normally-dependable things as the enter key
inserting a newline in the big block of text inside a text editor
cannot be counted on inside emacs depending on its "modes".

Emacs is very consistent in [being inconsistent]

Indeed, emacs IS very consistent in being inconsistent.

I don't WANT software second-guessing what I might find "most useful".
I want the mechanics of operating the UI to be simple and predictable
-- the more so the more complex the task I'm doing, as I especially
want simple and predictable building blocks the bigger the thing I'm
building with them. I don't want to have to second-guess the software
second-guessing me! This is exactly the sort of "trying to be too
helpful" thing blmblm complains about, and one of the handful of ways
that Eclipse ever annoys or disappoints me very much.

Sure there is. In fact there are several, of which of course emacs
honors none.

Cue Twisted trying to explain how Alt-Tab is a very natural way to
switch between tasks.

Simple: because that's what people learn to do from childhood these
days.

As I said, they look the same. The different "applications" look as
similar as a *single* Windows (or Mac or even X) application
displaying different *documents*

Just as you tell differnt apps apart by their names in Windows, of
course, you tell the different modes apart by /their/ names in emacs.

That's irrelevant to what I said. It's a subtle point, but even with
your awful IQ you may get it eventually. You see, there is ANOTHER
difference between apps in Windows, and that's that they look visually
nothing alike, ASIDE from their names. They have different widgets and
stuff displayed, you see. Not only that, the widgets tend to directly
communicate to the user what they can do and what effects various
clicks and keypresses will have in the UI. A big box of text with a
blinking insertion point, on the other hand, communicates "type text
and use arrows, backspace, and the like to edit the text here". Except
where the app's nonstandard behavior makes it completely meaningless
instead, as seems to be the case with emacs. In text mode, there's not
really much choice but to have a block of text with a cursor. But this
excuse is not applicable to any graphical version out there. Such a
version has *no* excuse for not communicating properly in the language
of widgets.

Experienced ones probably don't

[implied insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

If only a couple of thousand people out of tens of thousands of times
as many, i.e. less than 0.01% of people, will look there, I think
"nobody's likely to look" there is a fair approximation. We're talking
0.0001 or so of your target market here.

[insults deleted, including false accusation of dishonesty]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

(The figures come from a *generous* assumption of 10,000 existing
emacs users and a *generous* assumption of only 100,000,000 people
that edit text frequently. But even with a whopping 100,000 emacs
users or only 10,000,000 people that edit text frequently it's *still*
going to start with 0.00. :P)

Desired behavior, as decided by just about all of the people that
you've recommended emacs to but that don't currently use it, would be
for enter to consistently insert a newline into the big block of text.

Not once

YES, IT IS!

[completely irrelevant drivel deleted]

I accept your concession of the above point. Point: Twisted.

I do agree that many may have been tricked to believe otherwise from
whatever tools they used previously [remainder of paranoid ravings
deleted]

What a lunatic. Someone lock Bent up before he hurts someone. If only
me, my sides splitting due to laughter and needing hundreds of
sutures. :P

[prattles on in a vaguely insulting manner]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

but normal people in the normal world are
remarkably quick to recognize a superior tool when they see one and
eagerly adapt such.

Think about that carefully, Bent, and about the fact that nobody
normal touches emacs with a ten-foot pole.

Quite many do, of course, use emacs.

But nobody normal, and only a minuscule fraction of the total computer-
using population.

There's a tantalizing
implication there waiting for you to recognize it, once you grow your
second ever brain cell and it finds your first and grows you your
first ever synapse. :P

[straw man argument laced with insults deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

Indeed. Now notice how nobody much has, in the real world, realized
any "advantages" or tended to "embrace" it.

Except, of course, they often do.

Yep -- all three of them. Okay, maybe closer to three thousand. Out of
millions upon millions upon millions. Which is more likely -- the
world is wrong or this tiny sliver of a minority is wrong? There are
tiny tribes, the world's last hunter-gatherers, that are more populous
than you. Little dissident movements. Far-from-mainstream religious
cults. Terrorist organizations. The whole population of emacs users is
smaller than these pipsqueaks and twerps. The only such groups with
any voice or influence at all are the nasty violent ones. What do you
think your chances are of convincing anyone of anything? Your
ambitions and certainties are laughable in light of these numbers. The
text-editing population of the world outvotes you by a factor of ten
thousand or more. The computer-using by a hundred thousand or more.
The whole population by a million or two.

The set of all current emacs users is, indeed, "nobody much".

The only thing I'd
"embrace" it with is an Iron Maiden.

[implied insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

Several hundred million people
seem to agree with me

They do not agree or disagree with you - they simply have no opinion
on the matter.

Really? Do you see half of them using emacs? No. None of them? Almost
none? Yep -- almost none. Looks like the vast majority do agree with
me, if only implicitly.

Software that sends normal users running screaming. This is what you
peddle. This is why you fail.

and nearly everyone else on Earth simply doesn't
use computers at all. :P

Again, they have no opinion.

They certainly won't benefit from emacs.

Inconsistency in the UI is ALWAYS a Bad Thing, moron.

Except [snip]

NO. IT IS ALWAYS A BAD THING.

Except, of course, when it is a good thing.

WHICH IS NEVER!!!

[some irrelevant prattle deleted]

Bent seems to be conceding this point as well. (Also evidenced by his
earlier 180-degree switch to erroneously claiming that emacs' UI is
consistent.) Point: Twisted.

What the *** are you babbling about?

Real problem cases in the real world.

No, something you invented in Bent-world.

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

If that mainframe is as legacy
as supposed, it could be replaced with a fairly cheap desktop computer
that would run rings around it and, properly configured, do the same
job but have SIX nines of uptime.

Except "cheap desktop computers" don't actually have anywhere near the
reliability of even quite ancient mainframes.

Bollocks. Really cheap Dell *** may be that unreliable. Properly
constructed ones that are a smidgen more expensive, and not running
Windows, should do fine. Network several of them with failover, each
with a RAID drive, and you easily exceed the reliability of those old
clunkers by a large margin AND STILL for less money than those things
cost when new. And you'll now have thousands of times the memory and
megahertz, besides. At that point your main reliability issues are a)
a buggy update installed on all of them simultaneously, b) a security
breach, or c) an externally-originating network or power failure.
Geographic dispersion is the best defense against localized disaster,
and pretty much requires (presumably now VPN-networked) multiple
redundant small machines instead of single big monolithic ones.
Staggered updates will help avoid a buggy update flooring the whole
system in one shot, as well as resilience against sufficiently bad
behavior internal on the network (such as if a buggy update turns one
machine accidentally into a DoS-flood-bot) and diversity of
implementation is the only sure defense against all the machines
having a vulnerability in common.

Most likely it just needs to be
remotely administered from a desktop machine elsewhere that runs a
nice graphical frontend for whatever needs to be done on the
mainframe, though.

[implied insults and assorted nonsense deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

Which, if it's as legacy as supposed, is probably
"reboot it", and, once in a blue moon, "turn it off, wait till the
hardware guys to replace something, and THEN reboot it".

And, of course, occassionally, "make these changes: . . ."

Copy config file over, make changes, copy back. Easy to do with
networked drives. Almost as easy if the machine runs an ftpd or
similar accessible from inside the LAN (but presumably firewalled from
remote access, barring having the credentials to authenticate and
establish a VPN tunnel).

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

When legacy
parts get scarce

I think you will find that IBM are quite happy to support their
mainframes for quite some time to come yet.

Then that might take a while in happening. It will still happen. It's
only a question of when. And of course users of other vendors' mileage
may vary.

, the data needs to be exported to something sane
(like CSV, just temporarily) and then imported into something open-
source (like OpenOffice), in which case problem solved.

Yeah, right, you would import a banking system into OpenOffice. Heh.

I didn't say a banking system. A banking system would probably need
specialized client software connecting to a big fat PostgreSQL
database back-end running on a fairly beefy cluster, or something
similar. I've no doubt it can be modernized though, and probably far
more cheaply than most people think.

Permanently. :P

[implied insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

("Permanently" in that once the system is implemented with open source
software using open data formats, it should be possible to keep
migrating and updating components without any further truly-severe
difficulties.)

Sure it would. You're just inventing additional hypotheticals purely
for the purpose of trying to make me look like a liar. But I'm not a
liar, Bent; you are.

[insults deleted]

See above. You're still a liar, and none of the nasty things that you
have said or implied about me are at all true.

I dare say that if:
a) its software is awful and crufty to use, and

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

b) it's getting hard to find the right parts for the hardware, and

[false accusation of dishonesty deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

c) the data is in some legacy format that's increasingly not
supported,

[non-sequitur deleted]

Seek help.

then it's fucking broken and in dire need of repair

[insult deleted; basically calls me a liar]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

VT100 presumably uses a subset of these codes. The VT100 display
hardware does not actually show these colors, after all. Obviously,
then, a color VT100 is as mythical a beast as frigging Bigfoot no
matter WHAT escape sequences it uses.

Colour VT100 is easily observed in virtual[snip!]

In other words, in an imaginary world. Right next to the Starship /
Enterprise/; alien facehuggers; elves with magical powers living in a
town named Rivendell made of living trees; dragons; stargates; the
lost city of Atlantis; and numerous other such wonders of the virtual
CG world.

Show me a real, physical VT100 that has a full-color display and then
we can talk further about this. Until then, your fiction is of little
interest to me.

It doesn't need pixel-level acces to display underlining, or different
colours, of course.

But it does to display a proper GUI, of course.

[puts words in my mouth] colour and underlining

Don't ever put words in my mouth again.

Even so...

Show me a real, physical VT100 displaying blue underlined clickable
links and I'll capitulate this point. Until then, I will not.

And in practise none
of those old terminals could display blue, underlined, clickable
links.

[insults and other nonsense deleted, including more about the
mythical "VT100 protocol"]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

There is no "VT100 protocol". There is a terminal emulation. If that
emulation has color, it's not a faithful emulation of a real VT100 and
therefore it's standards-violating and will potentially gum things up
(e.g. if the app at the sending end makes the right sorts of
assumptions as part of a larger assumption that the receiver is
standards-compliant).

Your saying that they could in theory have constructed one that
would does not of course change the fact that NONE ACTUALLY DID!

And that is entirely beside the point.

NO. IT IS THE POINT.

The fact of the matter is that the protocol supports it

THERE IS NO PROTOCOL.

and you can witness this first hand (well,
you could if you were capable) using modern VT100 terminal emulators.

EMULATORS ARE IRRELEVANT. If you're using an emulator you can use a
VT420 emulator, or for that matter A REAL FUCKING GUI. :P

VT100 is a machine, an ancient monochrome terminal such as you might
hook up to a dial-up modem and use to log on to some ancient Unix
mainframe.

And a protocol

NO.

[lies about me]

No. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

Indeed you did.

Not.

[insults me and puts words in my mouth]

Liar. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

You specifically lambasted emacs for not being able to
make use of the full capabilities of modern graphics hardware.

By "modern" I meant "as modern as Windows 95"

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

, of course, which would
just mean scalable fonts and other normal Windows-style UI
capabilities.

Emacs has full support for true type fonts, of course.

It doesn't seem to have full support for dialog boxes. Not even the
graphical versions you keep changing the subject to. Indeed, all the
graphical ones seem to implement about half of a half-assed GUI and
clearly have a foot in each world instead of wholly committing to the
21st century and being redesigned from the ground up to be operated in
a fully modern way (and therefore by any ordinary user without
excessive training).

Remember I'm discussing the modern era of software with
standardized GUI interfaces, which began no later than 1995 and really
began all the way back around 1990 or so.

It began much before that, of course: The first Mac came in 1984.

Not really. That first Mac was a beginning, but it was black-and-
white, with an early prototypical GUI lacking numerous features of
modern GUIs. It also had little market share. Windows 3.1 more or less
launched the modern GUI era as it rapidly attained a big enough market
share to *matter*. The preceding Windows versions and MacOS versions
paved the way but that was all they did.

The protocol

WHAT protocol? See above. There was no wire protocol to speak of.

It is referred to as ANSI escape codes.

That's not a protocol. That's a crufty embedding of OOB data into a
raw ASCII stream. The actual protocol will be something like telnet
over TCP/IP over serial, or raw fucking RS232 serial, or dial-up v.
42bis, or something else.

There was raw ASCII over a line.

With ANSI escape codes.

Calling that a protocol is like calling HTML (not HTTP, HTML) a
protocol, idiot.

Some clever stuff was transmitted OOB
using escape sequences and other crufty mechanisms

[insult deleted]

See above. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied
about me are at all true.

, but of course the
VT100 with its monochrome display could not support any escape
sequences that purported to specify color text.

Of course it could

NO. IT COULD NOT.

If you define a "protocol" by "how a physical VT100 interpreted thus-
and-such" then obviously that protocol can specify, at most, shades of
grey. Perhaps even a whopping four of them -- black, white, and two
greys in between these extremes. Or perhaps that's black, bright
radiation-hazard green, and two greens in between these extremes. :P

Except that it didn't, as I demonstrated by exhibiting a case in which
it would indeed fail to alert you "instantly" when you had to modify
your query to get to the specific spot you were looking for.

[blatherings deleted]

It is YOU who claimed that emacs had such behavior. I merely am
pointing out that it does not and indeed cannot have the behavior YOU
ascribed to it!

No. Nothing about me is "faulty".

[insult deleted]

No. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

It always deletes the character it's /supposed to/, of course.

No, it does not.

Of course it does - I have never known it to do otherwise.

You explicitly described it failing to delete any character at all
under various circumstances, even when there was a user-input
character to the left of where a new one would be inserted if typed,
dip***!

You yourself have claimed that it sometimes fails to
delete any characters at all

It certainly doesn't delete characters when it's /supposed/ to not
delete characters.

Unfortunately, it doesn't *limit* its not deleting characters only to
when you're at the far left of the input field.

You said that the sensible backspace behavior would result in losing
access to earlier search results.

It would, yes.

I proved that wrong ages ago, dip***.

We have since found out that a) that
same problem would have plagued typing a new letter to add to the
query

It doesn't of course.

Sure it does.

foo
foob
foobar
foob
foobar

C-s foob C-s C-s and you're on the fourth line.

Backspace x3 (actual behavior, according to you) -> query is "foo" and
you're on the second line. AFTER one hit of "foo".
Backspace x1 (proposed nicer behavior) -> query is "foo" and you're on
the fourth line. After three hits of "foo".
Type a letter "a" -> query is "fooba" and you're on the fifth line.
AFTER one hit of "fooba".

Typing a letter "a", nice backspace behavior, and the actual backspace
behavior as described by you ALL lead in this example to being
positioned after one or more hits for the current query. If this is
such a big problem, then it is a big problem with its existing
behavior and not merely with my proposed nicer backspace behavior. If
it is not a big problem, then it is not a big problem with my proposed
nicer backspace behavior.

Face it, Bent. You're stuck between a rock and a hard place in this
case.

You lose.

and b) it doesn't actually happen anyway because the search
wraps.

[blather deleted, including a silly suggestion that emacs has ever
made any attempt whatsoever to be "user friendly"]

Pah. And see above.

So your objection to sensible backspace behavior proved not to
hold water.

[insult deleted]

See above. Also, none of the nasty things that you have said or
implied about me are at all true.

No matter. It suffices that I have used it, whether or not I keep a
personal copy.

[insult deleted][irrelevancies deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

The age of the copy I used is irrelevant if they haven't changed the
backspace behavior, or any of the other egregious behaviors I've
criticized, since then.

See above. You objected to sensible backspace behavior (i.e. always
delete the character to the left if there is one) on the grounds that
supposedly you'd lose access to some search results for "foo" if you
searched for "foob", moved a hit or two forward, and then backspaced
the "b" and the "b" immediately disappeared.

You would lose the hit history, yes.

And I've showed that you will lose access to some search results
anyway, modulo the ability to wrap.

Search for "foob" and you're at the second line above. Hit next-match
twice and you're at the final line. Backspace the "b" and with proper
backspace behavior you'd still be at the final line with "foo" in the
query.

This is the sort of awkwardness that emacs avoids.

It's not awkward; backspace behaving weird is awkward. And if not
being on the first hit for the reduced query is awkward, then the
backspace behavior you've described is awkward regardless.

But with the wonky backspace behavior, you have to backspace three
extra times

[quibbling deleted]

Don't quibble.

, and end up on line two with the "foo" in the first "foob"
selected, STILL not the first hit for "foo".

No, you will be at the first "foo" (line 1) at this point.

No, you won't. You went back to the first "foob" and then backspaced
the "b". At this point backspace behaves normally, or so you've
claimed.

If you're now claiming that backspacing the "b" jumps you all the way
back to the first "foo", even if there were twelve "foo"s before the
first "foob", then there's no reason for it not to do that immediately
if you hit backspace no matter how many "foob" hits you'd stepped
through, and have a different key perform the "previous match"
function.

Search for "foo", hit next-match three times to land at "foov", and
type "b", and you're on the last line, NOT the first hit for "foob".

Yes.

So much for typing a letter not suffering from the same "problem" you
claimed my proposed backspace behavior would have, then.

Your original objection to having backspace behave normally appears to
provide equally valid objections for the ACTUAL backspace behavior,
AND the behavior when typing another letter, AND seems pointless when
the search wraps anyway.

[some random nonsense and attempts at excuse-making deleted]

Your descriptions of its behavior are awkward. Worse, they're
inconsistent. Your objection to some nicer ways it could work is
equally applicable to the way you claim it actually works. Nothing you
have said justifies not having a separate "previous-match" binding and
a backspace that acts as people would expect. PEOPLE NEW TO EMACS in
particular.

Or, even better, the behavior you'd need to get what you ACTUALLY
seemed to want, which is that if you backspace from "foob" to "foo"
you're back on the first hit for "foo"

This is, indeed, what happens.

Then why not have C-s foob C-s C-s C-s backspace immediately leave you
with a query of "foo" and on the first hit for "foo"? (With some other
key functioning as "previous match".) You objected to that before on
the grounds that backspace moving you AND deleting something at the
same time would be crufty. And implied that backspacing the "b" on the
first hit for "foob" wouldn't move you, only delete the "b". Now you
contradict the latter, and claim that the actual behavior is behavior
you criticized as crufty when I suggested something somewhat similar.
This is ludicrous! As far as I can tell, in Bent-world behavior is
crufty if Twisted proposed it and non-crufty if emacs exhibits it,
independently of a) other software and thus-established standards, b)
other users and their wishes, and c) anything resembling reason or
logic. Even to the point that if I suggest a behavior that emacs
actually has it'd be, in your eyes, both crufty and non-crufty at the
same time, I suspect. :P

, so
being at "foov" above with a "foo" query and typing a "b" would put
you on line two instead of the last line.

This does not happen.

I know. I was just suggesting it as an alternative. But consistency
between modifying the query by deleting and modifying the query by
adding seems not to interest you much.

My preference would, of course, be for a) backspace to immediately
delete a character and leave you put, b) adding a letter to
immediately add it and leave you on the next hit (put if you're
already on one), and c) something else to do "previous match". From
your description, b) is the only one of the three that is consistent
with its actual behavior. :P

Yes, I am. I edit text a lot too, as it just so happens.

This does not seem likely.

To someone with your abysmal IQ, perhaps.

As for your implication that I'm lying: None of the nasty things that
you have said or implied about me are at all true.
.