Hi Bob.

18-Feb-04 19:26:03, Bob Lawrence wrote to Bob Lawrence

 BL> Hi all, I haven't gone mad, answering myself... I've just had an
 BL> insight into the way M$ thinks!

 BL> Not that Linux is much better. I had a look at emacs this
 BL> afternoon, and the rnthusiastic dickhead who wrote the manual
 BL> says: "emacs is the greatest program ever written!"

It's widely accepted that Richard Stallman has a big head.

 BL> Jesus! It's WordStar, revisited.

 You havens seen the built-ins.
   the web browser
   the games doctor
             tetris
             black-box
             dunnet     (text adventure)
             gomoku
             snake
             solitaire  (with stones in a cross shape)
             landmark   (dunno how to play this one)
   the email/newsgroup client
   the info reader
   the day planner
   the IDE features
   ....

"greatest" after all could be a measure of size rather than quality :)

 BL> Utter crap! I cannot believe an
 BL> editor could be made so clumsy to use! Whoever wrote it (whichever
 BL> committee, no one man could be this stupid) has no idea of
 BL> intuitive comands! Do you believe you have to type TWO commands to
 BL> exit?

??  ^x^c gets me out

 BL> And when it asks are you sure yes/no? you have to actually
 BL> type Y-E-S. And some of the commands are in capitals!

there's a way for it not to ask...  the "kill this buffer" or "revert
buffer" commands will defeat the "modified buffers exist" warning
but by default they're not mapped to any key.

OTOH if you save the files you've edited it'll not warn about modified
buffers either.  (^x^s to save)

I like the yes/no  it helps me rembmer to save all my edits.

it's all written in LISP so you can change it if you _really_ want to
there may even be a patch out there to do just that.

 BL> It's like
 BL> they took WordStar, and sat down to work out ways to make it even
 BL> more clumsy (WorStar won an Olympic Gold, for clumsy).

gotta agree there - especially if you're using a terminal with no cursor
pad.  OTOH it's got some really poweful features.

and some really odd ones - it's bigger than colossal cave...

 BL> Bloody hell! LOCK convinced me that Win98 is a dead loss, but
 BL> Linux is even worse!

 BL> I mean, if I wanted to insert a virus backdoor into Windows, you
 BL> would have to go a long way to beat LOCK. It's only a dozen bytes,
 BL> and then you OWN the drive. You can write anything you like on the
 BL> hard disc, it's yours exclusively for as long as it takes, and no
 BL> one need ever know what you wrote!

with linux you need to be root to open /dev/hda for pretty-much the same
powers, but you can do it in a high level language... possibly even emacs
lisp :^)

 -=> Bye <=-
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