Emacs 29.1 Released - No Longer Chokes On Very Long Lines

[lproven]

I love Emacs, but they should set the default keybinding to what Windows users expect. I don't mind Googling how to set up .emacs, but it's a huge (obsolete) barrier to entry...

So very much this!

It increasingly seems to me, though, that people don't know how to drive they computers from the keyboard, and they don't realise that Windows and the OSes in that family -- DOS, DOSshell, OS/2, Win9x, WinNT -- all have rich keyboard controls.

You can operate a Windows *desktop* PC pretty much 100%, and in most cases quickly and fluidly, with no mouse attached. *Everything* has keyboard shortcuts, and they were designed as a coherent whole, with families of related modifiers and modifiers that increase the effects of other modifiers.

And if you learn to do this, then you'll be much faster with a mouse or other pointing device as well, because you can mix'n'match them together -- unlike on macOS, where the keyboard UI is totally separate and unconnected from the visual graphical one, and must be specifically enabled.

But I see modern Linux graphical apps that bind, to pick a small instance, windows resizing to ctrl+cursor, because they don't know how to edit text in any Common User Access app.

They only know some cryptic old Unix text editor, such as Emacs or Vi.

There is a standard set of cross-OS app navigation keystrokes. It was designed in the late 1980s, led by IBM in response to the comprehensive Apple HIG books, and it works in late-era DOS apps, in OS/2 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, in Windows 2, 3, 4, NT, and in Xfce, in LXDE, in most older Linux desktops. Some of it works in macOS, KDE and GNOME, but inconsistently, because it's inherited and they clearly don't know where or why.

I used to know dozens of DOS era text editors, all with totally different keyboard UIs. CUA made it all go away.

There is a standard, and I don't care how many decades of tradition 1 obscure app has, I am not learning a new set for that 1 app. Text editing is a minority of my time and there is no editor so good I'm unlearning the keyboard UI from every other app to accommodate a single text editor.

Conform or die.

By all means keep the old one for old timers. Make it the default if the user has *any* existing config file at all.

But for new users, 100% CUA compliance out of the box, for the entire UI, or die in a fire.

[wertigon]

There is a standard set of cross-OS app navigation keystrokes. It was designed in the late 1980s, led by IBM

You wouldn't happen to have a reference to that document by any chance?

[moonlite]

I would've thought that native Wayland support would end up in a phoronix article.

[lproven]

You wouldn't happen to have a reference to that document by any chance?

A reasonable question but you do appreciate it was nearly 40 years ago, right? Before the WWW, before TCP/IP was the network standard, before the dial-up Internet was a thing for most people?

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.2.0?topic=reference-common-user-access-cua-guidelines

http://toastytech.com/guis/cua1987.html

After some digging, I think this is the book, but it's in a weird IBM format I can't read:

https://www.ibm.com/resources/publications/OutputPubsDetails?PubID=SC26458300

There is a free reader, but I am on an M1 Mac right now and it's a Windows tool.

It is part of this set:

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Common_User_Access

[wertigon]

Awesome work my man, now we just need to get the Gnome and KDE UI teams to read this!

I doubt Apple is going to care because Apple is Apple, and Microsoft is putting more and more of Windows on life support for every passing year. If it weren't for the commitments they already made to most of enterprise customers (at least 100 000 or so), we'd probably already see a migration to "Windows on Wayland" happening.

[Kemosabe]

Most people just want their code editor to work so they can write, they don't want to configure the editor. You shouldn't have to understand things about the underlying operating system just to use a text editor.

VS Code is easy to use, Emacs is shit, it is hell to use, it is only used by neckbeards. Emacs is so horrible people even get physically injured by operating it, a phenomena called "emacs pinky".

It starts with a 2 minute google search.
There is nothing really to configure.
Spacemacs is just one example.