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

[Peter Flynn]

On 12/10/18 08:42, Liam Proven wrote:
> 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.

My first editor was TECO on a TeleType when I was a student in the 70s.
Grad students got to use 30cps video terminals :-)

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

I only used 4-5 OSs but yes, the UIs were all different, some crazily so.

> 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.

Simple is good. One of the biggest puzzles is why -- after all these
years -- there is no decent XML editor usable by non-XML people. I did
some research on this a while back and found that all XML editors do
indeed implement all the functions an XML editor would be expected to
have, but they were often buried deep inside menus with naming that
users did not expect, or worked in an unexpected manner.

> This astonishes many of my colleagues.

I suspect your productivity is well in advance of theirs.

>> 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".

Hmm. Odd. I just typed 'emacs mydoc' in a terminal, I get Emacs with
that as a new file in Fundamental mode, which is "not specialized for
anything in particular". No autocompletion that I can see, basically
just a glass typewriter. I'll check my .emacs, as I do use xml-mode on
*.xml files, but I get the same result if I move .emacs out of the way.

> 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).

Could well be, although I suspect turning off all major modes would
result in no functionality at all.

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

Historic holdover to placate the ego of the original author, alas.
> I have never in a 30y career needed an editor macro.

I'd never have been able to survive without them. I daily fix and patch
other peoples' broken data or text, so being able to automate repetitive
tasks is important, otherwise I'd have no fingers left at this stage :-)

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

Most of my users are probably unaware that they are using macros every
minute of the day, especially LaTeX users.

> 3 books so far, countless documents and articles.

Pretty much the same.

> You use CUA, every day.
> There is no contemporary OS that is not CUA and has not been this century.

A hallmark of its success is that users are unaware of it.

> 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?

You shouldn't.

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

Every CS student writes one at some stage, if only to find out why using
an existing one is a better move :-) But most corporate applications use
an embedded editor, often written by one of their "partners", and
frequently incompatible with the rest of the world — but they do tend at
least to obey Ctrl-C/X/V/Z/P/S. My experience of them is that they are
flaky, to be polite...
> 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.

Yes. I can get the bare-bones functionality by moving my .emacs file
somewhere else where Emacs won't see it.

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

Bare-bones Emacs still uses its pre-CUA keystrokes for those functions,
but those functions are all there in menu. But I very rarely use mouse
and menus for common functions.

> 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?

No, the Emacs people can do anything they want with the bare-bones
level, so long as I can have my xml-mode and other conveniences. AFAIK
they're not interested in making Emacs' bare-bones defaults align with
CUA, for historical, personal, and small-p-political reasons. I'm not
really interested in their petty little squabbles: I just use the
software because it works for what I need to do. Which, mutatis
mutandis, is basically the same reasoning that you use, and that Michael
Sperberg-McQueen used in his explanation...just with different results.

It would be interesting to apply the same logic to people's choice of
operating system interface. What do Linux UIs *not* do that other do do?

///Peter

///Peter