hwg-software archives Jun 1998 new search results previous next

Re: Should I use EMACS?

by "Robin S. Socha" <robin(at)franck.pc.uni-koeln.de>

 Date:  14 Jun 1998 11:04:48 +0200
 To:  hwg-software(at)hwg.org
 References:  astra
  todo: View Thread, Original 
* David Meadows <david(at)goldenheroes.softnet.co.uk> writes:
>> From: Robin S. Socha <robin(at)franck.pc.uni-koeln.de>

>> I use it with html-mode and hm--html-minor-mode. This combination
>> rocks, because you get:
[cool stuff]

> Ok, this all sounds useful. But with Word I don't need to put
> the HTML tags in directly myself, so you haven't convinced me
> yet...

With Word, you don't see the code. But rest assured that what you
would see would make you want to nuke Redmond for actually taking
money for this pathetic piece of fuvg.

>> it's got all those nifty little packages (like htmlize by Hrvoje
>> Niksic that allows you to put syntactically highlighted code on
>> the web just like that[...] I find this particularly helpful for
>> putting CGI scripts on the web because they become so much more
>> readable.

> I'm not sure that I understand you. Why not just make them
> readable yourself when you type them?

Which is better:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "+//Silmaril//DTD HTML Pro v0r11 19970101//EN">
    <font color="#8c0000">else</font> <font color="#00008c">#comment
</font>	{<font color="#ce8600">print</font> "<font color="#008a00">$entry\n</font>";}
or 

else #comment
{print "$entry\n";}

And just how long would this here take you:
<http://franck.pc.uni-koeln.de/~robin/dotemacs_w.html>? And would you
end up with errors? The thing is, eg perl is a write only language. I
can produce code that you will not understand. But syntax highlighting 
might help you a lot, so why not use it?

[...]
>> Well, quite true, but... there is one reason everybody should switch
>> from Word to XEmacs, but it has nothing to do with HTML. It's LaTeX
>> and it will allow you to prepare beautiful documents with a flick of
>> the wrist. It will also allow you to prepare 5000 pages long documents
>> with 1000s of tables, pictures and bibliography entries without ever
>> crashing.

> Ok! Now that's impressive! The page count ceiling is my biggest beef
> with Word.

Check <http://franck.pc.uni-koeln.de/~robin/download/user.guide.ps> I
did that one from ASCII-scratch with 3 hours. It's pretty lousy code,
to be frank, but it looks kinda nice. It could not have been done in
Word, trust me.

>> And the quality of the output should put the morons in Redmond to
>> shame from here to eternity. That said, I would like to point out
>> that it /does/ have something to do with

> No, you lost me again... surely the quality of your output owes more
> to your printer than your Word Processor?

He. Hehe. Heheheee... Check the above document and tell me if it can
be done in Word. Or any other word processor. Mind you, it's far
from being good. If you want to see "good", check official documents
on a CTAN server near you. Nope, the main difference is that LaTeX
is a text processor that is actually aware of your entire document
instead of just single lines. It's a little like HTML (both are a
subset of SGML, anyway) in that the author does not have to care
about the visual formatting, because LaTeX uses external style files
for that. Think of CSS and you're there.

ObHTML: if you're planning to do any kind of documentation or story,
you should definitly consider learning LaTeX (it's a very, very simple
language if you stick to the basics - which will get you from here to
eternity in 99% of all cases). And it can be turned into very
effective HTML:
<http://cbl.leeds.ac.uk/nikos/tex2html/doc/latex2html/latex2html.html>
It's like FrameFaker and WebMaker - but entirely free.

[point and click interfaces]
>> Tell me: had you rather go "grab mouse, open 3
>> menues, open and close 4 dialogs, switch to the keyboard again,
>> grab the mouse again, click some more"

> Do you actually know how to use Word? 

Absolutely. I've typeset a book with it. Stop laughing.

> I rarely touch the mouse. When I pulled a tendon in my arm a few
> weeks back I managed a full day's work without using the mouse and
> with no loss of productivity that I could determine (my typing was a
> little slower ;-) ).

If you bind keys to functions, sure. But since Word does not
allow for simple things like C-c M-n C-s C-d C-t (shortcut for
hm--html-add-description-title-and-entry), I'd be running out of
keys before I even got half of the macros I need to shortcuts.

>> or just M-x hm--html-add-description-title-and-entry[1] and hit
>> RET?

> You have to type all that to do something? Good grief, I hope
> whatever it does is really useful.

Ummm... yes, it is, but since I use lightning completion, I only have
to go M-x hm-addes-ta. It's not that very useful in this particular
case, but can be if you use such keystrokes to create entire framesets.

> Thanks to you both for replying. You haven't convinced me, but
> at least I understand (a little) better what Emacs is.

Not even Richard Stallman understands what Emacs is. 

This is getting heavily OT: reply-to set,
Robin

-- 
Robin S. Socha     Join the Fight: <http://www.enemy.org/>
If you think I'm all alone you are foolishly wrong
There's an entire army who blindly follow along

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