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Re: Pseudo-disk *almost* ready for the big time.



mdj wrote:
Michael J. Mahon wrote:


Ok, now that's *really* cool!

It's been years since I used emacs (on a DEC-20), but I loved it.

It's a very consistent, simple program with a huge set of commands.
Since I was using it "occasionally", I was delighted with the "apropos"
command, which directed me to what I was looking for when I didn't
know what it was called.  If only modern "help" systems were as
helpful!  ;-)

"Real *hackers* use emacs."  (..in the *original* sense, of course.)


Of course, real hackers are real programmers, so the emacs users are
the real programmers :-)

While I would consider myself an emacs user rather than a vi user, I
still tend to use vi for the quick dirty jobs, and only use emacs for
serious coding sessions. This is a hangover from the days when 8mb was
a lot of RAM to use up on your text editor :-)

Of course GNU Emacs ( http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html ) is
still actively developed, and runs on pretty much any platform you care
to name, including win32, so why not check it out ?

If you get hooked, you might find yourself like me, investing in
shareware titles to remap caps-lock as control on these badly designed
modern keyboards :-)

My exposure to emacs was also my first serious exposure to multiple
"shift" keys.

This was in the early 1980s, and the culture inspired a parody
keyboard design with seven "modifier" keys and a single "real" key!

The design was created by a "shadow" parody lab team known as
"Muppet Labs" within a major industrial R&D lab.  It was proposed as
a humorous alternative to a workstation keyboard, dubbed a "playstation"
keyboard.  ;-)

The keys were Ctrl, Shift, Alt, Hyper, Meta, Super, and Ultra, and
the lone real key, "Cookie", was located in the center of the other
7 keys and had a picture of a cookie on it.  (The Cookie Monster was
the project lead engineer!  ;-)

This "chord" keyboard could, of course, produce the full 7-bit ASCII
code.  ;-)

-michael

NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."