The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Falcolas]

On Jun 22, 4:12 pm, Pascal Bourguignon <p... at informatimago.com> wrote:
> Anything that the user have to do repeatitively with the GUI, like
> copy-and-paste, or reformating of a lot of paragraphs or table
> entries, and which is done automatically by writting a one-liner
> program in emacs or shell.

So the tool they were using did not support macros? You're right, that
would suck. I'm guessing this is before you could expose the Unix
underpinnings on the mac.

I will agree that I do miss much of the standard shell utility when
working in windows. Fortunately, I am able to replace a lot of that
with well written python or perl scripts.

> And they tried to put graphical user interfaces on scripting, it
> doesn't work either.  Programming is working with text, with verbs.

Recording macros could be considered a form of programming, which can
have nothing to do with any text. Granted, they're pretty dumb if you
don't manually modify them, but really, nothing is stopping you from
modifying them either. I can't count the number of times I've created
a macro to do repeated modification of a text file.

I guess ultimately I'm trying to argue the point that just because a
tool was written with a GUI or on Windows does not automatically make
it any less a productive tool than a text based terminal tool. Even in
windows, you can use the keyboard to do all of your work, if you learn
how (thanks to the magic of the alt key).