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

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2018 at 14:42, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
>
> Their authors' argument would be that they were there first, so it's CUA
> that's out of step :-)

Oh yes. Heard that many times. But really, the battle is over...

> As you say, fixing Emacs is pretty straightforward.

I wish I had the skills.

> The dual-mode model of editing went out with TECO (read: "the ark"). The
> idea is that you have to press a key before you can type anything, and
> press another key before you can start editing what you've typed. This
> made sense when using TECO to edit a magnetic tape, but it makes no
> sense whatsoever in the modern world for normal text-editing purposes:
> despite being actually a very small piece of excise, it's alien to the
> generality of UIs, even Emacs.

Agreed.

Mind you, CREAM is pretty impressive.

http://cream.sourceforge.net/

> There is a lot of personal pride and history invested in Emacs, largely
> orbiting around the cult of its principal author, and the culture in
> which it grew up. It certainly was groundbreaking, and it remains one of
> the very few editors that can edit *anything* (for most practical
> purposes), meaning it's at the bottom of the toolbag of most systems
> engineers for use when everything else has failed. Once the cultus
> disappears, it will change.

Hmmm. I wonder.

Borland's excellent Sprint wordprocessor for DOS was built on top of
an EMACS clone.

I wonder if the way to go is to make out that it is a whole _new_
editor, but not mention that it's based on Emacs? :-D

> But to use it for editing plain, unmarked text is like using a Saturn V
> launcher to rescue your drone stuck in a tree.

Aha. Interesting. I've not heard it put like that before.

It disagrees with one of my favourite ever tech essays:

"In the Beginning was the Command Line"  by Neal Stephenson
http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html


>  On heavily marked text,
> however, such as TEI, it's the only free system available with proper
> controls; and its biggest use is for program code, which has a wholly
> different set of requirements.


Hmmmmm. Maybe I should reconsider and give ErgoEmacs another go...


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