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Mar. 8th, 2003 03:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneI've said before that one of my favorite things about Linux is the variety of software for the same job. The also leads to one of my pet peeves about Linux: finding a single tool that has enough advantages for certain lazy tasks.
Take text editors. I'm using gedit at the moment, which runs rings around Windows Notepad and Wordpad if only because it saves its display features beyond choice of font. I like a dark background and a light-colored text, as well as a semi-serif typeface. Every time I open gedit, I get a Prussian blue screen and a canary yellow cursor waiting for me to type. However, if I make a mistake but I don't notice it for a while, I need to reach for my trackball. You see, gedit handles text as paragraph-long strings. If I hit the up arrow and I've typed 50 characters in a paragraph, it moves the cursor to the point after the fiftieth character in the previous paragraph and not the location on the previous geometric line of text. This pisses me off. However, the text wraps properly, so I often get the most work done in this application... until it's time to check my spelling.
When I use a more traditional (meaning: older) text editor, such as emacs, I get a lot of the features I prefer. I get spell-checking on the fly and HTML sensitivity. However, I get a white background and black text in a small, ugly font. Even when I call emacs from a shell (for non-geeks: this means I open emacs by typing "emacs" inside a command line that looks like the old DOS prompt), which means I want emacs inside that window, I get it in another window with the black on white et cetera. What a pisser.
(For all geeks: you would not befuckinlieve how many Windows users have never knowingly invoked a DOS prompt on their own computers. You'd think 1995 was a billion years ago. It is so much faster to copy files via DOS prompt, especially on an older computer, but so many people have no idea what that means anymore.)
"Sure," many of you more skilled geeks will reply, "but you just need to format your .emacs file for these settings." (Some of you may also yell "invoke vi, you heretic!" Both are valid answers.) It's true also that I'd get my shell fonts and such in vim, perhaps even in elvis (yes, non-geeks, there is a text editor named elvis. Someone should make a matching spell-checker and program lint and call it 'aron'.)
I get annoyed by all of this. Sure, I can set it once, but it means I need to read the manual. I've written manuals, so I loathe reading most manuals. They don't explain things based on a user's perspective, which is why they get underused. I'll scour a text editor's manual for "change the background color" and wind up finding this treated as an obscure nugget. I cannot be the only typist in America with a fear of eye strain.
I now have about ten text editors. I downloaded two extra ones tonight (nedit and joe). I like jed, but only when I'm working on code (it has crummy line-wrap features). I like nedit so far because it has some obvious commands, including a button for spell-checking. I'm always willing to try something new.
This brings me to browsers, my original topic. I have about six on this Linux partition (Opera, Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, lynx, and probably the old w3) and another couple on my win98 side. However, most web sites write their code as if everyone runs Internet Explorer. I've used about twenty browsers in my life, from the original Mosaic to the squirrelly but sound icab. I prefer Opera because it uses the least RAM and it works the fastest. However, I tried reading the International Herald Tribune online (http://www.iht.com) and couldn't see the articles.
I've got Flash 6 installed, a couple Java engines, the whole ball of parsing wax. Why can't I use one browser to get all of my reading done? Why can't I use one text editor to get all of my writing done? Why do I need to edit a file I don't even have just to get the colors I want? Waaaaaaaaah.
I want tools for writing text files, not tools that make you say "how great thou art" to them. It's like listening to unknown gangsters brag about themselves. A tool should be useful as it is invisible.
This should be the goal of the next generation of programmers: make us tools that we cannot help but use and use correctly.
That said, should I invent an .Xdefaults file just because one program wants it?
I'm worried I'll have to leave the Red Hat fold soon. They've started wanting extra money. I got a 60-day extension on my 1.5-year-old, five-computer license by filling out a survey; after that, they want $5 a month if I want fresh, precompiled kernels. Are such kernels worth the cost?
-please let me know, Dante
Take text editors. I'm using gedit at the moment, which runs rings around Windows Notepad and Wordpad if only because it saves its display features beyond choice of font. I like a dark background and a light-colored text, as well as a semi-serif typeface. Every time I open gedit, I get a Prussian blue screen and a canary yellow cursor waiting for me to type. However, if I make a mistake but I don't notice it for a while, I need to reach for my trackball. You see, gedit handles text as paragraph-long strings. If I hit the up arrow and I've typed 50 characters in a paragraph, it moves the cursor to the point after the fiftieth character in the previous paragraph and not the location on the previous geometric line of text. This pisses me off. However, the text wraps properly, so I often get the most work done in this application... until it's time to check my spelling.
When I use a more traditional (meaning: older) text editor, such as emacs, I get a lot of the features I prefer. I get spell-checking on the fly and HTML sensitivity. However, I get a white background and black text in a small, ugly font. Even when I call emacs from a shell (for non-geeks: this means I open emacs by typing "emacs" inside a command line that looks like the old DOS prompt), which means I want emacs inside that window, I get it in another window with the black on white et cetera. What a pisser.
(For all geeks: you would not befuckinlieve how many Windows users have never knowingly invoked a DOS prompt on their own computers. You'd think 1995 was a billion years ago. It is so much faster to copy files via DOS prompt, especially on an older computer, but so many people have no idea what that means anymore.)
"Sure," many of you more skilled geeks will reply, "but you just need to format your .emacs file for these settings." (Some of you may also yell "invoke vi, you heretic!" Both are valid answers.) It's true also that I'd get my shell fonts and such in vim, perhaps even in elvis (yes, non-geeks, there is a text editor named elvis. Someone should make a matching spell-checker and program lint and call it 'aron'.)
I get annoyed by all of this. Sure, I can set it once, but it means I need to read the manual. I've written manuals, so I loathe reading most manuals. They don't explain things based on a user's perspective, which is why they get underused. I'll scour a text editor's manual for "change the background color" and wind up finding this treated as an obscure nugget. I cannot be the only typist in America with a fear of eye strain.
I now have about ten text editors. I downloaded two extra ones tonight (nedit and joe). I like jed, but only when I'm working on code (it has crummy line-wrap features). I like nedit so far because it has some obvious commands, including a button for spell-checking. I'm always willing to try something new.
This brings me to browsers, my original topic. I have about six on this Linux partition (Opera, Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, lynx, and probably the old w3) and another couple on my win98 side. However, most web sites write their code as if everyone runs Internet Explorer. I've used about twenty browsers in my life, from the original Mosaic to the squirrelly but sound icab. I prefer Opera because it uses the least RAM and it works the fastest. However, I tried reading the International Herald Tribune online (http://www.iht.com) and couldn't see the articles.
I've got Flash 6 installed, a couple Java engines, the whole ball of parsing wax. Why can't I use one browser to get all of my reading done? Why can't I use one text editor to get all of my writing done? Why do I need to edit a file I don't even have just to get the colors I want? Waaaaaaaaah.
I want tools for writing text files, not tools that make you say "how great thou art" to them. It's like listening to unknown gangsters brag about themselves. A tool should be useful as it is invisible.
This should be the goal of the next generation of programmers: make us tools that we cannot help but use and use correctly.
That said, should I invent an .Xdefaults file just because one program wants it?
I'm worried I'll have to leave the Red Hat fold soon. They've started wanting extra money. I got a 60-day extension on my 1.5-year-old, five-computer license by filling out a survey; after that, they want $5 a month if I want fresh, precompiled kernels. Are such kernels worth the cost?
-please let me know, Dante
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no subject
Date: 2003-03-08 08:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-08 07:06 pm (UTC)well, you should be able to run emacs in an X window. try running the confusingly-named xemacs (which is not merely emacs-with-X-enabled, but rather a separate fork of emacs - look here for more details). that should solve a number of your windowing problems.
dunno if gedit has vi-like syntax, i'll look into it tomorrow when i'm at work and have access to a linux box.
and finally, ????? 5-computer license? to what are you referring? Red Hat Linux is free as in beer. if you're talking about the Red Hat Network, there are programs such as this one that give you similar functionality at no charge.
feel free to bounce further questions off me.
-steve