'Emacs style' delete line shortcut (CTRL/U) doesn't work correctly in Firefox

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2018 at 00:40, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
>
> :-) It was a choice at the time which suited me. The alternatives were
> too horrifying to contemplate (bi-modal editors, flag characters...)

I just started work early enough that I remember the hell of pre-CUA
editors. My first job was before Windows 3.0, or OS/2 1.0, or Linux
0.01.

I worked with about a dozen different OSes. All had different UIs.


> > I write English for a living, not code. I don't want any features at
> > all related to any kind of code handling.
>
> Right. I write English too, but mostly tech doc, for which I do have a
> highly specific set of requirements. And I code a lot, so a vanilla text
> editor (eg Notepad) would be worse than useless.

Me too these days: mostly in Docbook XML, and a little AsciiDoc.

I'd prefer something simple and straightforward, such as Notepad, to
something powerful but arcane, such as Emacs or Vi.

This astonishes many of my colleagues.

> Interesting: i haven't seen that one. It's all off by default.

Sadly, no, it isn't. By default, on Ubuntu, SUSE and macOS, it
attempts to autocomplete what I think is eLisp and I have found no way
at all to remove _all_ the "major modes".

I think it's the sort of thing Emacs-heads don't even notice. They
press super-hyper-aleph-magic-F47-omega and turn it off (or something
like that).

> No, for his audience they are valid. I live in a text editor: I rarely
> use applications, but I too switch systems and platforms often, so I
> require the identical interface everywhere.

Me too. And none of my computers have a "meta" key, so anything that
refers to it is straight out.

> > Macros? Bloat. Not needed, for me.
>
> Quite out of order for your needs. Essential for mine.

I have never in a 30y career needed an editor macro.

I used to *teach* writing macros, in at least 3 languages, but I've
*never* needed one in my text editor.

3 books so far, countless documents and articles.

> > I use many apps across many OSes. They all have the same basic UI --
> > the CUA UI.
>
> That would be critical for anyone using them, I assume.

You use CUA, every day.

There is no contemporary OS that is not CUA and has not been this century.

> Absolutely. I wish more people would insist on this: it might stop
> foolish application developers imagining that their weird-ass interface
> is going to take over the world in the face of everything else (GIMP
> finally realised this, although it took them a while).

Right. So I won't use anything that talks about "frames" and "buffers"
when it means windows with files in. I won't use anything in which cut
isn't Ctrl-X or at least Shift-Del. Why should I?

> I wish that were true: my former employer's corporate finance
> application had one of these "we think this is much better than the
> standard" interfaces which drove everyone insane. And you can't change
> that kind of application free of charge, unfortunately.

Absolutely true. But text editors? There are literally _thousands_ and
most are free.

> It succeeds on every single test for the type of work I do, over the
> same time period, fortunately.

Good for you!

But if I may ask:

Imagine you get a new machine. Before you import your emacs.el or
whatever, its Emacs comes up with menus entitled File, Edit, View, ...
Help.

On File, ^O is "open file". ^N is "new file", ^P is print, ^S is save.

Etc etc. No "buffers", no "frames". Same editor, but standardised UI.

Once you import your settings, everything goes back to normal, of course.

Would this bother you? Would it stop you using Emacs?

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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