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Thanks. I suppose I would have to see this in practice to be able to understand and appreciate it. My memory is limited so it doesn't seem worth the trouble to

Thanks. I suppose I would have to see this in practice to be able to understand and appreciate it. My memory is limited so it doesn't seem worth the trouble to learn such a niche system. Still there's something intriguing about it as someone who tries to keep one's mind open about different design systems. As a ui/ux designer what strikes me with these legacy systems is there seems to be no fluent support system in place for learning them. And even after you've learned, no visibility to support long term memorization. Also, I suppose there is no clear visual panel to support memory as to what's actually in the ring but you kinda have to just browse it one by one with shortcuts, as I understand the above? Do the terms kill/yank seem appropriate to others? It seems that there is a slang context I'm missing there that might make the terms more intuitive.

nine_k 5y ago
People 40 years ago were no less smart than ourselves, but the machines they had in their disposal were much, much less mighty. Coding discoverability features into them was often very hard, especially with relatively slow terminals of the day. They relied on manuals instead. Now we have inherited these technologies, but there is often no reasonable way to modernize their UX in the discoverability department, because of key assumptions made decades ago. All we can use now is still manuals; `man bash`, search for the READLINE section, and read the extensive explanation of the riches hiding there. You can search by regexp, so ^READLINE will bring you right to the section, but again there is no affordance to show you that a regexp is acceptable. And yes, I think nobody thought through the terms kill / yank; their authors just picked some metaphors 40 or more years ago, because they were building a tool for themselves and their colleagues in a computer department of a university, all engineers used to weird abstractions. The world is very different by now.
jks 5y ago
In modern Emacs versions the top of the kill ring can be found in the Edit menu, and there are other packages to help navigate it: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BrowseKillRing https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BrowseKillRing I agree that the ancient terminology is a problem with Emacs. People who are used to Emacs don't want to change it, but it is alien to all new users. Funnily enough, in vi (a competing old text editor that predates current UI standards) "yank" means "copy". Another example is "window" and "frame", which mean the opposite that you would think if you have used any modern windowing system. A similar problem (that is not strictly about terminology) is the way "undo" works. It is more powerful than the standard undo/redo system, but it can be very confusing when you encounter it the first time. Repeated "undo" commands work the way they do in other programs, but once you run any other command, the undo operations go in the undo history just like other commands and are themselves undoable, so the way to cancel an undo operation (which is called "redo" in many other programs) is to type some character and then run "undo" twice.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Emacs gives you a pretty pampered experience. The subthread started with a discussion of the shell command line, and its Emacs-like editing mode, which remains quite Spartan in its affordances: if you don't know the keys, nothing will hint or guide you. (With Emacs as my daily driver, I greatly miss its uniformity of window management even in environments that look like its spiritual successors, like VSCode.)

nine_k 5y ago

People 40 years ago were no less smart than ourselves, but the machines they had in their disposal were much, much less mighty. Coding discoverability features into them was often very hard, especially with relatively slow terminals of the day. They relied on manuals instead. Now we have inherited these technologies, but there is often no reasonable way to modernize their UX in the discoverability department, because of key assumptions made decades ago. All we can use now is still manuals; `man bash`, search for the READLINE section, and read the extensive explanation of the riches hiding there. You can search by regexp, so ^READLINE will bring you right to the section, but again there is no affordance to show you that a regexp is acceptable. And yes, I think nobody thought through the terms kill / yank; their authors just picked some metaphors 40 or more years ago, because they were building a tool for themselves and their colleagues in a computer department of a university, all engineers used to weird abstractions. The world is very different by now.

jks 5y ago

In modern Emacs versions the top of the kill ring can be found in the Edit menu, and there are other packages to help navigate it: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BrowseKillRing https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BrowseKillRing I agree that the ancient terminology is a problem with Emacs. People who are used to Emacs don't want to change it, but it is alien to all new users. Funnily enough, in vi (a competing old text editor that predates current UI standards) "yank" means "copy". Another example is "window" and "frame", which mean the opposite that you would think if you have used any modern windowing system. A similar problem (that is not strictly about terminology) is the way "undo" works. It is more powerful than the standard undo/redo system, but it can be very confusing when you encounter it the first time. Repeated "undo" commands work the way they do in other programs, but once you run any other command, the undo operations go in the undo history just like other commands and are themselves undoable, so the way to cancel an undo operation (which is called "redo" in many other programs) is to type some character and then run "undo" twice.

nine_k 5y ago
Emacs gives you a pretty pampered experience. The subthread started with a discussion of the shell command line, and its Emacs-like editing mode, which remains quite Spartan in its affordances: if you don't know the keys, nothing will hint or guide you. (With Emacs as my daily driver, I greatly miss its uniformity of window management even in environments that look like its spiritual successors, like VSCode.)