BL> I had a look at emacs this afternoon, and the rnthusiastic
BL> dickhead who wrote the manual says: "emacs is the greatest
BL> program ever written!"

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

 And a very shaky grip on reality...

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

 I haven't seen them, but I got a good gioggle reading that they
existed... in a text editor!

BL> Do you believe you have to type TWO commands to exit?

JB> ?? ^x^c gets me out

 Count them... one, two. ^c ^x

 It could have been worse... he might have insisted on upper case.

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

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

 So what's wrong with ESC or ENTER like everyone else uses? Why type
Y-E-S.

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

 And WORD is written in VB. What's that got to so with it?

 Haven't you realised that life is short, yet? Why would you want to
stuff around with a bloody text editor? You could write your own,
quicker.

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

 An H-bomb has powerful features too... but I don't want to try one.
What dfo you mean by "powerful features?" What theat usually means
when applied to a program is, "Useless features that don't justify the
overall clumsiness."

 To me, M$ WORD is the perfect program. If you just want to write a
letter, you don't need to think, just do it. If you want to write a
book, you might have to learn about STYLES. If you want to do
something right off the wall, WORD can do it. It's written on levels.
The lowest level is totally intuitive and ther highest level needs a
programmer... but it can do *any* word processing. Another excellent
program is AutoCAD. And then there is the pathetic shit like EMACS...
amateur hour at Cunnamulla.

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

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

 Linux is done right. There is no way to get into root from a user.
With Windows, you just sail straight through.Microsoft seems to have
this crazy idea that if you make it diffiucult for an ordinary user,
that's enough to stop hackers. Hackers *live* on difficult!

Regards,
Bob

--- BQWK Alpha 0.5