Now with actual Emacs!
I finally have the chance to actually play along the guided tour, and the first thing I tried was to run the tutorial. Painless enough, when I did Ctrl-h and then t, I got a new tab in Aquamacs with the tutorial. Perhaps Aquamacs is to different from the regular Emacs to actually go through the guided tour, since “typing” c-h actually types ”c-h” (I can hear a thousand screams of terror). If I ESC out of whatever mode into thatother mode to try the commands there, it’s just plain confusing. Things start flying around as soon as I touch anything, I just deleted the “tutorial” part out of the first line, I hope it still functions as a tutorial, maybe that word was somehow connected to the helpful aspect of the entire document, it wouldn’t surprise me.
I found out what “M-something” means from the first few lines (after a paragraph warning me that some of the commands had been altered, presumably because I’m running Aquamacs). It means “hold the META or EDIT or ALT key down…”. I’m simply baffled by this. Who is this written for? What the hell is a META key? EDIT has a special key now? Not anywhere I’ve ever been. I’m sure I’m the subject of serious ridicule in some very tight circles now. Circles so tight they must have constricted the blood flow to the brain of whoever thought this needed to be anything else than the ALT key… Yes, my macbook pro keyboard has an ALT key, don’t get me started on the stupid option key thing, fuck that.
I’m still confused by the wording “type C-x C-c” (this is to save and close, or maybe just close, I haven’t figured it out quite yet). Why “type” for commands? It’s not really typing when I’m issuing commands, nothing get’s “typed” out on the white “paper” I’m working with. I guess there’s nothing wrong with calling it that, I’ve just never seen it before. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not going to be the last new thing I see…
I also see that the tutorial hasn’t been fully updated for the Aquamacs version, since it’s telling me there some characters “»” somewhere at the left margin. Ahhh, I see, the actual tutorial document contains the actual written characters of “»” where there is some call to action for me, i.e. directions for me to follow, haha now I get it. For some reason I thought of “the left margin” as being something to the side of the text I was reading, like how a margin in a book is the space between the text and the boarder of the actual piece of paper that text is printed on, whereas here the “»” characters simply appear at the beginning of a line some few lines below where this is mentioned.
Talking about those few lines, I guess they are there to make the tutorial somehow fit nicely on this standardized unit of measure that they refer to as “the screen”. I was being all silly and just using the multitouch trackpad to scroll around the document at leisure. This of course is wrong, and the tutorial is now telling me I should issue the command of C-v if I want to move down and ALT-v when I want to move up, one “the screen” at a time. It also suggest I try to move around a few times by issuing (typing) these commands. I happily oblige, however I find that if I start at the very tippy top screen and issue two C-v commands to move down two screens, and then issue the ALT-v to move up one screen, my cursor is not positioned at the same line as it would be if I had issued only one C-v command to go down only one screen from the top. I can not decipher if this is intentional, and I guess I’ll have to find out if it’s annoying in use (it’s merely puzzling for now).
Ahhh, a Summary, good, I need to be reminded of how to move about in a text editor. Wait, there’s a new command introduced in the summary, C-l, helpfully clarified to be CONTROL-L and not CONTROL-1 (I can see that there could be confusion, depending on the font). This is interesting, I’m used to Summary chapters being a summary of the preceding information, rather than addition. I’m splitting hairs here, it’s not that important to be consistent with external conventions, I mean, this is Emacs after all, no other conventions or standards exist.
Regardless, C-l (that’s a lower case L) is a handy command, jumping the view to center on the current line the cursor is in and if issued again throws the view such that the current line is at the very top, and if issued for the third time, to the very bottom. Well, not the very bottom, the second to last line. This cycle, if interrupted, resets, that is, if you C-l two times, move the cursor with the arrow keys (they do work to move the cursor for me, yay) and then C-l again, the view does not get thrown such that the line you moved your cursor to goes to the bottom, it only goes to the center. This is perfectly understandable and probably quite helpful to get orientated in a document.
Now I find the first mention of the PageUp and PageDn keys, explaining that they do indeed work, however since my “terminal” the macbook pro does not have such keys I probably will follow the suggestion that I can edit more efficiently if I move around with the C-v ALT-v combo. This I probably agree with, since I never quite got the hang of the each hand at the very bottom corner of the keyboard handy fn-UP/DOWN thing on the mac.
I got home and the download finished immediately (yay for Fiber). Installation (of Aquamacs) was painless, since it’s a dmg and even has that little “drag this to over here” call to action that everybody understands. I have a feeling the rest of this is not going to be as smooth.
I’m reading the guided tour for Emacs, and it’s no fun. It’s like the biggest oversell I’ve ever seen. If this is a text editor, why do I know about the Tetris part before I understand what C-x C-s actually means? I know what it does, it saves, yays, but is it Ctrl-x and then Ctrl-s? Why does it say “type C-h t” if it means Ctrl-h followed by t? And what the hell is M-x, what key is M short for? I know the answer (and it’s not pretty) - the “type”ing you’re actually doing is issuing commands, if that makes sense. Somehow the text editor part doesn’t want you to enter any text, and all the buttons are different commands. This is to make it better to use, somehow. The fact that this guided tour hasn’t mentioned the command mode and input mode difference is just plain confusing for a first time visitor.
(Source: gnu.org)
Dear god, I’m downloading Emacs. Aquamacs actually. Maybe I’ll document the horror on this here blog here.
First horror. It’s big, like 49mb and it’s taking forever to download on this crappy WiFi at school. Owell, I’ll use the time to read the “guided” tour.
WASP Injection Knife vs. Watermelon (via WaspKnife)
Yay, let’s all make knives even more fucking dangerous!
