6 ms·

> I’m aware of “apropos”, but it also uses antiquated terminology can you clarify 'antiquated' for me please

schemescape 3y ago
Here’s an example: M-x, “apropos”, RET, “copy text” No apropos matches for “copy text” Using just “copy” returns two undocumented variables first. I did eventually find kill-ring-save, but it took more digging than I’d like. Obviously if I embraced (or at least remembered) Emacs’s terminology I’d have a better experience, but I’m not there yet. Edit again: “copy selection” found copy-region-as-kill, which is maybe what I should have searched for originally. Not sure yet how it differs from kill-ring-save.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  OK, fair enough
- alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
  I'm sympathetic to this argument but I just searched apropos for "cut" and then for "copy" and got many commands related to cutting/copying text. Granted also that the words "copy" and "cut" don't seem to appear in the results, so you still have some reading to do, but the metadata is apparently there. What version of Emacs did you try?
munch117 3y ago
Yank instead of paste. Frame instead of window. Kill instead of delete. kill-ring-save instead of copy. I was going to add 'visit instead of open', but I guess that bit has changed over the years. C-x C-v no longer invokes 'visit-file'.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  While I completely get what you're saying it's not really fair to expect Emacs to be compatible with systems that came after it. If you going to work in Emacs you have to pretty much work on its terms, which I think is fairly reasonable and speaking only for myself, I found very worthwhile. If you think it would make it more accessible to have certain changes, email the Emacs issue/bug people with constructive suggestions and see what they say; they are extremely responsive (then try doing the same with Apple or Microsoft and see what happens :-) )
  - munch117 3y ago
    I'm a happy Emacs user myself. Nobody change anything for my sake.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    It absolutely is fair to expect Emacs to use industry standard terminology to avoid confusing users. At this point, keeping the outdated, idiosyncratic terminology and default UI paradigms serves no purpose except unnecessary gatekeeping. > (then try doing the same with Apple or Microsoft and see what happens :-) ) Microsoft, the authors of Visual Studio Code, the editor most developers use? Whose team has been lauded for being super responsive to developer feedback?
    - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
      > It absolutely is fair to expect Emacs to use industry standard terminology to avoid confusing users "Initial release 1976; 47 years ago" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs). There was no such standard terminology back then. May I recommend you avoid using Emacs to avoid the concomitant headache of getting involved in Emacs discussions, thank you.It clearly isn't for you.
  - schemescape 3y ago
    For the record, the intent of my original post was just to see if someone had already encountered and solved my problem (having difficulty finding Emacs commands, due to inexperience). The use of “archaic”, etc. was meant humorously, and not as a complaint about Emacs. I wouldn’t mind if the maintainers added some more modern synonyms for commonly needed commands, but I wouldn’t expect them to.
    - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
      The following is my personal experience only. When I decided to learn Emacs I bought a book (the fat O'Reilly one),sat down and practised the keystrokes. I made a few scratch notes as well. Within a few hours, not days, I found movement to be extremely straightforward and much more comfortable than the old windows/mac way, for the great part. When I was doing my own project I would do most of my work in Emacs but regularly swap back to VStudio because of its LSP support. Swapping back and forth between these two very different environments brought on a few mistakes (wrong key in wrong editor) but astonishingly few. I got comfortable doing switches pretty quickly which is surprising because they are so utterly different, but that's how I found it to be. I ended up spending more time in VS because of better LSP, but built-in LSP support is coming in the next Emacs. Good. Because once I went back to 'standard' keyboard commands, I never felt comfortable. It just doesn't feel right. Also Emacs is so vastly more capable in some ways it just blows VS away. In other ways VS is better certainly, in the more advanced technical stuff such as LSP, in other ways, screw it. So: grab a book, prepared to put in a bit of time, good luck! (Edit: just remembered, I certainly did buy the book but started off doing the built-in Emacs tutorial before that)

Here’s an example: M-x, “apropos”, RET, “copy text” No apropos matches for “copy text” Using just “copy” returns two undocumented variables first. I did eventually find kill-ring-save, but it took more digging than I’d like. Obviously if I embraced (or at least remembered) Emacs’s terminology I’d have a better experience, but I’m not there yet. Edit again: “copy selection” found copy-region-as-kill, which is maybe what I should have searched for originally. Not sure yet how it differs from kill-ring-save.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
OK, fair enough
alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
I'm sympathetic to this argument but I just searched apropos for "cut" and then for "copy" and got many commands related to cutting/copying text. Granted also that the words "copy" and "cut" don't seem to appear in the results, so you still have some reading to do, but the metadata is apparently there. What version of Emacs did you try?

munch117 3y ago

Yank instead of paste. Frame instead of window. Kill instead of delete. kill-ring-save instead of copy. I was going to add 'visit instead of open', but I guess that bit has changed over the years. C-x C-v no longer invokes 'visit-file'.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
While I completely get what you're saying it's not really fair to expect Emacs to be compatible with systems that came after it. If you going to work in Emacs you have to pretty much work on its terms, which I think is fairly reasonable and speaking only for myself, I found very worthwhile. If you think it would make it more accessible to have certain changes, email the Emacs issue/bug people with constructive suggestions and see what they say; they are extremely responsive (then try doing the same with Apple or Microsoft and see what happens :-) )
- munch117 3y ago
  I'm a happy Emacs user myself. Nobody change anything for my sake.
- bitwize 3y ago
  It absolutely is fair to expect Emacs to use industry standard terminology to avoid confusing users. At this point, keeping the outdated, idiosyncratic terminology and default UI paradigms serves no purpose except unnecessary gatekeeping. > (then try doing the same with Apple or Microsoft and see what happens :-) ) Microsoft, the authors of Visual Studio Code, the editor most developers use? Whose team has been lauded for being super responsive to developer feedback?
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    > It absolutely is fair to expect Emacs to use industry standard terminology to avoid confusing users "Initial release 1976; 47 years ago" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs). There was no such standard terminology back then. May I recommend you avoid using Emacs to avoid the concomitant headache of getting involved in Emacs discussions, thank you.It clearly isn't for you.
- schemescape 3y ago
  For the record, the intent of my original post was just to see if someone had already encountered and solved my problem (having difficulty finding Emacs commands, due to inexperience). The use of “archaic”, etc. was meant humorously, and not as a complaint about Emacs. I wouldn’t mind if the maintainers added some more modern synonyms for commonly needed commands, but I wouldn’t expect them to.
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    The following is my personal experience only. When I decided to learn Emacs I bought a book (the fat O'Reilly one),sat down and practised the keystrokes. I made a few scratch notes as well. Within a few hours, not days, I found movement to be extremely straightforward and much more comfortable than the old windows/mac way, for the great part. When I was doing my own project I would do most of my work in Emacs but regularly swap back to VStudio because of its LSP support. Swapping back and forth between these two very different environments brought on a few mistakes (wrong key in wrong editor) but astonishingly few. I got comfortable doing switches pretty quickly which is surprising because they are so utterly different, but that's how I found it to be. I ended up spending more time in VS because of better LSP, but built-in LSP support is coming in the next Emacs. Good. Because once I went back to 'standard' keyboard commands, I never felt comfortable. It just doesn't feel right. Also Emacs is so vastly more capable in some ways it just blows VS away. In other ways VS is better certainly, in the more advanced technical stuff such as LSP, in other ways, screw it. So: grab a book, prepared to put in a bit of time, good luck! (Edit: just remembered, I certainly did buy the book but started off doing the built-in Emacs tutorial before that)