The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[Twisted]

On Jun 26, 6:17 am, Gian Uberto Lauri <s... at spammer.impiccati.it>
wrote:
> Children pick  up other language without any  conscious effort because
> either they learn  it by using with parents,  relatives and friends or
> they are involved in a game-like style of learning.

Actually, it's proven that there's a critical period for language
learning "coming naturally" that ends around age seven. Children
actually have enhanced learning abilities due to brain physiology and
plasticity.

> T> I know people who find all kinds of vehicles easy to learn but
> T> never mastered a bicycle (despite trying). People, plural, as in
> T> more than one of them.
>
> Again, fear, or maybe, some  malfunction in the balancing organs.  But
> fear mainly. You do not see what keeps a bike upright and running, you
> have to trust that you can.

Oh, come off it. One of those people is a physics professor, who knows
the mechanics of gyroscopic stability and things of that nature
backwards and forwards. And his sense of balance is fine -- he has no
trouble with that except when he's quite drunk. He told me the problem
was the bike tipping over before it could get up enough speed to
become stable. My own guess being there's a "knack" you may or may not
eventually get, for getting past that initial hurdle and getting it up
to speed when it becomes stable.

Of course, this "knack" isn't something found in any instruction
manual. I'm wondering if getting your head around unix arcana is also
dependent on an iffy "knack" where you "get it" and somehow know where
to look for documentation and problem fixes, despite everything having
its own idiosyncratic way, and "get" some sort of workflow trick
going, or you don't. Personally, the thing I always found most
irritating was the necessary frequent trips to the help. Even when the
help was easy to use (itself rare) that's a load of additional task
switching and crap. Of course, lots of the time the help was not easy
to use. Man pages and anything else viewed on a console, for example
-- generally you could not view it side by side with your work, but
instead interrupt the work, view it, try to memorize the one next
step, go back to your work, perform that next step, back to the help
to memorize another step ... that has all the workflow of a backed-up
sewer, yet until and unless the commands become second nature it's
what you're typically forced to do without a proper GUI. Navigating
also being a pain -- generally it's easy to get it to scroll down, or
exit; hard but usually possible to scroll up in case you overshoot;
and there's some arcane search capability, but it isn't
straightforward to use so you can't use it because you'd need to be
open to the help for the help viewer or other tool instead of the help
you're trying to search, and then your search would come up empty. The
searching-help instructions not being in the same help file as the
target of your search proves to be the final straw, and you throw up
your hands in disgust after going a few rounds with "thetool", "man
thetool", and "man man" and make an inch of progress in an hour, most
of it spent on typing, scrolling, or memorizing rather than on working
with "thetool".

Maybe the thing I really, REALLY deplore is simply having 99% of my
attention forced to deal with the mechanics of the job and the
mechanics of the help viewer and only 1% with the actual content of
the job, instead of the other way around.