Emacs touch
I recently came across a thread in comp.lang.python namely The Modernization of Emacs which stressed the need for changing emacs to "appeal to the masses" I actually clicked the thread just because of the sheer number of replies to thread - 269 last count. But upon reading, I found it really interesting. I had almost given up learning emacs, after I felt it was not worth it, but this reply by Bjorn Borud made me start thinking.
I am quoting his reply here and I bet these, are worth a read.
Sometimes it is better than what you had before, but often it is not really better, just different. a good example is the web and the applications we implement in terms of the web. take forums for instance. in a strict technical sense, web-based forums are inferior to NNTP-based forums.for my uses, web forums are a huge step back from NNTP.
There are two types of "user friendly". there's "user friendly" and then there is "beginner friendly" which is often mislabeled. the latter is more important for applications which are to be used casually. like utilities you only use once or twice per year -- those need to be "beginner friendly".
for applications you are likely to use for prolonged periods of time (like programming, video editing, music production etc), it does not make sense to optimize for "beginner friendly". at least not at the cost of making the application less "user friendly".
applications you spend a lot of time using are worth an investment in learning how to use them. what creates friction in an application you know reasonably well is when common tasks are fiddly. for instance, while menus are often good for casual use and lower the initial threshold for absolute beginners, depending heavily on menu navigation becomes too fiddly if you are performing a certain task 2-3 times per minute. it is not _user_ friendly.
Emacs is rather "user friendly", but not very "beginner friendly". when I was first confronted with it, the sort of text editors I was used to were Wordstar and derivatives of it. I was rather annoyed that it didn't do what I expected, so I just used a different editor.
a few years later I bemoaned the fact that Emacs was so hard to use during a conversation with a friend. he asked me if I had actually made an effort to learn Emacs, which of course I hadn't. so I figured I might as well give it a shot.
so I hope, no I think i WILL become an emacs Pro some day
:)
Bye
Labels: emacs, google groups, newsgroup, python
Wine for life
There are some neat configuration stuff, I need to master before I can run other windows applications in Linux.
I also installed my favorite(well almost favorite) Typing tutor in linux(see pic on right) Anyway my all time favorite ktouch in kde (linux) just rocks. Also in the screen shot you can see the scientific calculator and emacs;Emacs is the most coolest editor in Linux.
Yesterday I also registered our college project as a GPL'd project in Google. You could check it out in 3dcluster. It features as the 2nd result when you search for ' openmosix ' and features as 3rd when you search for ' linux cluster' ; I got really excited to see those results. Below I have included the screen shot of the search result.
(Click on the images to enlarge them)At its bare minimum, using the powers of Java2D, implement more user friendly interfaces. Like clicking on the image of a cluster node will reveal all the details of the cluster; On the longer run I would love to walk through a room full of cluster nodes and being able to click on a cluster to get its details(probably done in Python or Java3D) I would also love to incorporate some sleek python tools into this great project.
And if anyone would love to join this project, could just visit the site http://code.google.com/p/3dcluster/ and there you will find the details of joining the project.
Happy coding guys. Bye
More linux adventures
(A new desktop enviornment -WM that I came across in SuseLinux)Sorry guys for not updating the blog for so long. I bet this wont happen often from now on. The screenshot is from my linux machine. I recently came across the 'Session' menu in the login screen which I had ovderlooked earlier. But this time, it did catch my attention. There were many desktop enviornments to choose from and I liked this one, namely Window maker which loads at lightning speed(KDE takes some time to show up!) and is pretty cool too.
Emacs story
Another great thing is that I started taking up learning emacs seriously. Its just a superb editor/IDE/word-processor/email-composer/ and the list goes on..... But in order to exploit its full potential one has to have a very good grasp of its key bindings(key shortcuts) and I am in the process of becoming an emacs Guru :)
Last week I also installed a distro called 'DreamLinux' - its just so cool. So i now have 2 great linux distros just for multimedia :
- 64bit studio and
- DreamLinux
Other news
I had taken a book called 'Unix power tools' from the library which i plan to look into, in the next week.
.net classes started in NIIT . And the sir who teaches us this subject is really superb. Classes are between 11:00 to 3:00 in the weekends. Last saturday was the first class, and it went on pretty well.
Ok bye then
