Anyone use ELSE minor-mode in Emacs?

[Peter Milliken]

Francois,

I was disappointed when I read of your "defection". However, I can perhaps
understand it. I have participated in "constructive" "my editor is better
than your editor" threads over in comp.editors in the past. Vim has an
impressive array of tricks - the discussion basically came to a "draw" with
the only thing that I use in Emacs that Vim couldn't offer was ELSE - enough
for me to stay with Emacs! :-)

Allow me to summarise it all with the following:

>From ``The Zen of Programming'':

    Hearing a disturbance, The master programmer went into the novices
    cubicle.

    ``Curse these personal computers!'' cried the novice in anger, ``To
    make them do anything I must use three or even four editing
    programs.  Sometimes I get so confused that I erase entire files.
    This is truly intolerable!''

    The master programmer stared at the novice.  ``And what would you
    do to remedy this state of affairs?'' he asked.

    The novice thought for a moment.  ``I will design a new editing
    program,'' he said, ``a program that will replace all these others.''

    Suddenly the master struck the novice on the side of his head.  It
    was not a heavy blow, but the novice was nonetheless surprised.
    ``What did you do that for?'' exclaimed the novice.

    ``I have no wish to learn another editing program,'' said the
    master.

    And suddenly the novice was enlightened.


Emacs did it all at a time when there was no other editor that had the
features and worked across/on all platforms - now that other editors have
"caught up", I see no reason to change :-)

Peter

"François Pinard" <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote in message
news:mailman.250.1071675774.9307.python-list at python.org...
[John J. Lee]
> François Pinard <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> [...]
> > P.S. - If I'm using past instead of present, about ELSE, this is because
> > not so long ago, I switched my habits away from Emacs (towards Vim).

> Why? [...] But maybe you were originally a vi user, and have just had
> a long emacs detour?

No.  You cannot imagine how much I could not stand `vi' for myself.  On
machines without Emacs or some form of Emacs clone, I was using `ed', or
even `sed', just for avoiding finding myself stuck within `vi'.  So, to
see myself using Vim now, represents an astonishing conversion! :-)

The "Why?" is a bit difficult to tell in a few words.  Especially since
I still consider Emacs as a wonder.  I explained my reasons to a few
friends and saved my notes, and I'll probably turn them into some Web
page if I find some more free time.  Let me post the URL here then...

Let me say right away is that I would have never ever considered Vim if
it did not offer proper Python support.  Pymacs seems more powerful to
me that Python in Vim, yet Python in Vim is neat and quite usable.

Vim surprisingly has many functionalities, under paradigms which vary
slightly or greatly, which I thought Emacs was alone to offer.  This
helped me to "swallow the snake", which admittedly has been rough :-).

--
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard