Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of common
applications are much harder to use than before?
kwrite
krename
k3b
Are the first few that spring to mind :(

-- 
Will J G

Folderol wrote:

> Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of common
> applications are much harder to use than before?
> kwrite
> krename
> k3b
> Are the first few that spring to mind :(

No, amarok 2 is completely useless and almost unusable compared with 1.4. I 
can't say I've had any problems with k3b though.

	Simon

On Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:10:38 +0000, Folderol wrote:

> Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of common
> applications are much harder to use than before? kwrite
> krename
> k3b
> Are the first few that spring to mind :(

K3b certainly isn't harder to use than before.
No experience of the other two - I don't use Kde.




-- 
Neil
Reverse 'r and a' Delete 'l'

"Simon J. Rowe"  writes:

[...]

> No, amarok 2 is completely useless and almost unusable compared with
> 1.4.

I'm finding it adequate, but I don't use it much.  It seems to have lost
a feature, in that I don't seem to be able to copy a playlist to my MTP
device (which certainly supports playlists, and 1.4 was happy to create
them).

Folderol  writes:

> Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of common
> applications are much harder to use than before?
> kwrite
> krename
> k3b
> Are the first few that spring to mind :(

Emacs 23 is better than its predecessors, for what it's worth.

On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:06:47 +0000
Bruce Stephens <bruce+usenet@cenderis.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Folderol  writes:
> 
> > Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of common
> > applications are much harder to use than before?
> > kwrite
> > krename
> > k3b
> > Are the first few that spring to mind :(
> 
> Emacs 23 is better than its predecessors, for what it's worth.

There is always one! :)

-- 
Will J G

On Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:02:01 +0000
"Simon J. Rowe"  wrote:

> Folderol wrote:
> 
> > Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of common
> > applications are much harder to use than before?
> > kwrite
> > krename
> > k3b
> > Are the first few that spring to mind :(
> 
> No, amarok 2 is completely useless and almost unusable compared with 1.4. I 
> can't say I've had any problems with k3b though.
> 
> 	Simon

The latest version of k3b doesn't seem to have the bottom layout of
quick entries for CD & DVD image files, and hunting for these through
the menus is less than intuitive (to put it mildly).

Incidentally I tried the new burner on the latest ubunto release and
gave up in the end - for the same reason.

I'm not a KDE user as such, but those apps have always been the best
for me.

kwrite now uses a small dialogue box at the bottom of the page for
things like 'find' entries, so you seem to keep having to scan up and
down. It also means you have to have the whole page visible, not just
the bit you're working on.

krename now has a multi-tabbed system which is far less intuitive for
quick 'n dirty bulk renaming.


-- 
Will J G

On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:44:41 +0000, Folderol wrote:

[...]

> The latest version of k3b doesn't seem to have the bottom layout of
> quick entries for CD & DVD image files, and hunting for these through
> the menus is less than intuitive (to put it mildly).

As with earlier versions of K3b, you just right-click on the lower area 
and select what you want to appear from an Add Button menu. All that has 
changed is the default selection.

Now the stability of KDE4 is more realistically stable I'm trying to get 
to like it. I'm still finding some things I don't like, and the changes 
to Amarok have ruined it!

Chris

-- 
Remove prejudice to reply.

On 31 Oct 2009, Bruce Stephens outgrape:

> Folderol  writes:
>
>> Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of common
>> applications are much harder to use than before?
>> kwrite
>> krename
>> k3b
>> Are the first few that spring to mind :(
>
> Emacs 23 is better than its predecessors, for what it's worth.

Yeah, the butterfly is really useful. (Yes, really.)

Meanwhile, at the uk.comp.os.linux Job Justification Hearings, Folderol chose 
the tried and tested strategy of:

> kwrite now uses a small dialogue box at the bottom of the page for
> things like 'find' entries, so you seem to keep having to scan up and
> down. 

Have to disagree with you there - I can't stand popup windows!

> It also means you have to have the whole page visible, not just the bit you're 
> working on.

Not sure what you mean there. Just tested it here and it searches fine 
regardless of how much of the page is visible.

-- 
 <http://ale.cx/> (AIM:troffasky) (UnSoEsNpEaTm@ale.cx)
 09:57:15 up 14 days,  7:06,  4 users,  load average: 0.44, 0.27, 0.17
 "Stupid is a condition. Ignorance is a choice" -- Wiley Miller

Meanwhile, at the uk.comp.os.linux Job Justification Hearings, Folderol chose 
the tried and tested strategy of:

> Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of common
> applications are much harder to use than before?

krdc has some annoyances, eg you get a tab bar whether you need it or not, the 
status bar takes up screen space even though there's never anything of any use 
in it, and why can't I type a URL into the address bar in the same form as it 
appears in the history?

The settings dialog for kvpnc doesn't seem to fit on a 1024x768 screen [and 
that's just with a single taskbar, not that weird double-taskbar shit that 
Gnomers seem to like!], although I've only just got my hands on kvpnc 4 so need 
to do a little more testing.

-- 
 <http://ale.cx/> (AIM:troffasky) (UnSoEsNpEaTm@ale.cx)
 10:02:23 up 14 days,  7:11,  4 users,  load average: 0.26, 0.26, 0.18
 "Stupid is a condition. Ignorance is a choice" -- Wiley Miller

Chris Whelan wrote:

> On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:44:41 +0000, Folderol wrote:
> 
> [...]
> Now the stability of KDE4 is more realistically stable I'm trying
> to get to like it. I'm still finding some things I don't like, and
> the changes to Amarok have ruined it!

Agreed! Those huge buttons look awful....

Amarok is my favourite app in KDE and it's shocking update in KDE4 is
definitely not encouraging me to upgrade.

-- 
The email address is a spam trap. I rarely use it.

Folderol wrote:

> Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of
> common applications are much harder to use than before?
> kwrite
> krename
> k3b
> Are the first few that spring to mind :(

I think the 'k' is a giveaway. KDE4 is a big change across the board,
some apps will have 'got it' and other won't have. YMMV. ;)
 

-- 
The email address is a spam trap. I rarely use it.

Simon J. Rowe wrote:
> Folderol wrote:
> 
>> Or does anyone else think that many of the latest versions of common
>> applications are much harder to use than before?
>> kwrite
>> krename
>> k3b
>> Are the first few that spring to mind :(
> 
> No, amarok 2 is completely useless and almost unusable compared with 1.4. I 
> can't say I've had any problems with k3b though.

I seem to recall, at one time, making an audio CD with k3b. I wanted to 
play a podcast in the car. The podcast was well over half an hour. k3b 
was able to split it into tracks of 5 minutes or so, to make navigation 
easier.

I can't find that option any more! Is it gone, or just hidden? I'm 
almost certain it was k3b... I don't do that sort of thing often, so my 
memory may be failing. Maybe it was another app?

(Still using 2008.1 with kde 3.5)

Frank

Chris Whelan wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:44:41 +0000, Folderol wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> The latest version of k3b doesn't seem to have the bottom layout of
>> quick entries for CD & DVD image files, and hunting for these through
>> the menus is less than intuitive (to put it mildly).
> 
> As with earlier versions of K3b, you just right-click on the lower area 
> and select what you want to appear from an Add Button menu.

Eek! That's really arcane! You sure there's nothing less unintuitive 
available? How about File|New Project?

Frank

alexd wrote:
> Meanwhile, at the uk.comp.os.linux Job Justification Hearings, Folderol chose 
> the tried and tested strategy of:
> 
>> kwrite now uses a small dialogue box at the bottom of the page for
>> things like 'find' entries, so you seem to keep having to scan up and
>> down. 
> 
> Have to disagree with you there - I can't stand popup windows!

Yes, I'm surprised more editors don't do it this way. I bought EditPad 
Pro, years ago, on Windows, and it uses this idea. So you don't have a 
dialogue box hiding the text that you're trying to search, getting in 
the way. Far better to have it out of the way at the bottom. Should have 
taken over the world by now.

Frank

On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:48:18 +0000, Frank Peelo wrote:

> alexd wrote:
>> Meanwhile, at the uk.comp.os.linux Job Justification Hearings, Folderol
>> chose the tried and tested strategy of:
>> 
>>> kwrite now uses a small dialogue box at the bottom of the page for
>>> things like 'find' entries, so you seem to keep having to scan up and
>>> down.
>> 
>> Have to disagree with you there - I can't stand popup windows!
> 
> Yes, I'm surprised more editors don't do it this way. I bought EditPad
> Pro, years ago, on Windows, and it uses this idea. So you don't have a
> dialogue box hiding the text that you're trying to search, getting in
> the way. Far better to have it out of the way at the bottom. Should have
> taken over the world by now.
>
My favourite Windows editor, the Programmer's File Editor (PFE) had a 
number of pop-up windows that implemented the dialogues for searching, 
executing OS commandline commands, manipulating window stacks, etc. 
Editing windows occupied the whole of its MDF main window. The pop-ups 
could be dragged away and positioned outside the main window on the 
desktop. This worked very well - so much so that I'm surprised that more 
applications haven't done something similar.
   

-- 
martin@   | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org       |

On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:43:20 +0000, Frank Peelo wrote:

[...]

> Eek! That's really arcane! You sure there's nothing less unintuitive
> available? How about File|New Project?
> 
> Frank

The OP was specifically asking for help with buttons that exist in K3b 
for KDE4; what you are suggesting would not provide those.

Chris

-- 
Remove prejudice to reply.

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 00:45:11 +0000 (UTC)
Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> wrote:

> On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:48:18 +0000, Frank Peelo wrote:
> 
> > alexd wrote:
> >> Meanwhile, at the uk.comp.os.linux Job Justification Hearings, Folderol
> >> chose the tried and tested strategy of:
> >> 
> >>> kwrite now uses a small dialogue box at the bottom of the page for
> >>> things like 'find' entries, so you seem to keep having to scan up and
> >>> down.
> >> 
> >> Have to disagree with you there - I can't stand popup windows!
> > 
> > Yes, I'm surprised more editors don't do it this way. I bought EditPad
> > Pro, years ago, on Windows, and it uses this idea. So you don't have a
> > dialogue box hiding the text that you're trying to search, getting in
> > the way. Far better to have it out of the way at the bottom. Should have
> > taken over the world by now.
> >
> My favourite Windows editor, the Programmer's File Editor (PFE) had a 
> number of pop-up windows that implemented the dialogues for searching, 
> executing OS commandline commands, manipulating window stacks, etc. 
> Editing windows occupied the whole of its MDF main window. The pop-ups 
> could be dragged away and positioned outside the main window on the 
> desktop. This worked very well - so much so that I'm surprised that more 
> applications haven't done something similar.

My 'history' is Acorn RPC, where again dialogue windows are separate
and can be moved where you want them instead of taking up fixed desktop
space, so I always tend to look for applications that work in that way.

For a similar reason I originally chose kwrite against gedit mostly
because kwrite gives me a separate window for each view whereas gedit
forces tabs on you. Copy and paste (or simply just looking for
reminders) is dramatically faster with separate views - especially if
you configure the desktop so that working inside a window work area
does NOT bring the window to the front - something that is impossible
in gnome :( 


-- 
Will J G

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 08:33:31 +0000
Folderol  wrote:

> For a similar reason I originally chose kwrite against gedit mostly
> because kwrite gives me a separate window for each view whereas gedit
> forces tabs on you. Copy and paste (or simply just looking for
> reminders) is dramatically faster with separate views - especially if
> you configure the desktop so that working inside a window work area
> does NOT bring the window to the front - something that is impossible
> in gnome :( 

You can drag the tabs out of gedit to get separate windows. And of
course it isn't impossible to prevent windows jumping to the front in
GNOME. Even metacity [1] can do it, but with side effects.

[1] I don't know why GNOME still uses it as the default window manager.
It's a botched experiment attempting to prove that it's impossible to
write a window manager that's flexible, friendly and consistent, and
maintainable, which is all proven wrong by xfwm4.

-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk

On 3 Nov 2009, Frank Peelo spake thusly:

> alexd wrote:
>> Have to disagree with you there - I can't stand popup windows!
>
> Yes, I'm surprised more editors don't do it this way. I bought EditPad
> Pro, years ago, on Windows, and it uses this idea. So you don't have a
> dialogue box hiding the text that you're trying to search, getting in
> the way. Far better to have it out of the way at the bottom. Should
> have taken over the world by now.

Emacs has done this since the 1970s. Since a bunch of very popular
wordprocessors descended fairly directly from Emacs (notably WordStar,
at I think a two-generation remove), it's suprising that the avoid-dialogs
isearch-is-king idea fell so much into abeyance.

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:01:00 +0000
Tony Houghton  wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 08:33:31 +0000
> Folderol  wrote:
> 
> > For a similar reason I originally chose kwrite against gedit mostly
> > because kwrite gives me a separate window for each view whereas gedit
> > forces tabs on you. Copy and paste (or simply just looking for
> > reminders) is dramatically faster with separate views - especially if
> > you configure the desktop so that working inside a window work area
> > does NOT bring the window to the front - something that is impossible
> > in gnome :( 
> 
> You can drag the tabs out of gedit to get separate windows. And of
> course it isn't impossible to prevent windows jumping to the front in
> GNOME. Even metacity [1] can do it, but with side effects.

I must admit I wasn't aware of that. Although I think it still doesn't
allow multiple views on the same document.
 
> [1] I don't know why GNOME still uses it as the default window manager.
> It's a botched experiment attempting to prove that it's impossible to
> write a window manager that's flexible, friendly and consistent, and
> maintainable, which is all proven wrong by xfwm4.

I'm an openbox user myself. I have very precise demands on how my WM
behaves and this one works for me. 

-- 
Will J G

On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:30:14 +0000
Folderol  wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:01:00 +0000
> Tony Houghton  wrote:
> 
> > You can drag the tabs out of gedit to get separate windows. And of
> > course it isn't impossible to prevent windows jumping to the front in
> > GNOME. Even metacity [1] can do it, but with side effects.
> 
> I must admit I wasn't aware of that. Although I think it still doesn't
> allow multiple views on the same document.

That's a nuisance. Neither does gvim, which also doesn't let you drag
tabs out of their original window. These limitations, especially in
conjunction with browsing compiler errors, drove me to write vixn. If I
mention the word "Throwback" to you as an ex-RISC OS user, maybe you'll
be wishing you liked vi now :-).

> > [1] I don't know why GNOME still uses it as the default window manager.
> > It's a botched experiment attempting to prove that it's impossible to
> > write a window manager that's flexible, friendly and consistent, and
> > maintainable, which is all proven wrong by xfwm4.
> 
> I'm an openbox user myself. I have very precise demands on how my WM
> behaves and this one works for me. 

I quite like that one too, but all its themes are almost identical and
it needs quite a lot of tedious text editing to make it behave sensibly,
whereas I can set up xfwm4 with a few clicks. IIRC I can even do it all
with its standard config tool without having to run the "tweaks" one
too.

-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk

On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:48:48 +0000
Tony Houghton  wrote:

> On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:30:14 +0000
> Folderol  wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:01:00 +0000
> > Tony Houghton  wrote:
> > 
> > > You can drag the tabs out of gedit to get separate windows. And of
> > > course it isn't impossible to prevent windows jumping to the front in
> > > GNOME. Even metacity [1] can do it, but with side effects.
> > 
> > I must admit I wasn't aware of that. Although I think it still doesn't
> > allow multiple views on the same document.
> 
> That's a nuisance. Neither does gvim, which also doesn't let you drag
> tabs out of their original window. These limitations, especially in
> conjunction with browsing compiler errors, drove me to write vixn. If I
> mention the word "Throwback" to you as an ex-RISC OS user, maybe you'll
> be wishing you liked vi now :-).

I did have a couple of stabs at both vi and emacs and found both of
them infuriatingly arcane with the keyboard shortcuts for everything
and no visible menu structure (it may have been there, but I couldn't
find it). My 'raw' text editor of choice is therefore nano.

I had a quick look at vixn and initial impressions are good. Simple,
clean layout - exactly what I want for real work. I couldn't find search
and replace. Are they there but on vi-like shorcuts?

Seeing as we're talking re-tread RISC-OS, drag 'n drop load and save
would be nice :)

Hmm, throwback. Now you're teasing aren't you!

> > > [1] I don't know why GNOME still uses it as the default window manager.
> > > It's a botched experiment attempting to prove that it's impossible to
> > > write a window manager that's flexible, friendly and consistent, and
> > > maintainable, which is all proven wrong by xfwm4.
> > 
> > I'm an openbox user myself. I have very precise demands on how my WM
> > behaves and this one works for me. 
> 
> I quite like that one too, but all its themes are almost identical and
> it needs quite a lot of tedious text editing to make it behave sensibly,
> whereas I can set up xfwm4 with a few clicks. IIRC I can even do it all
> with its standard config tool without having to run the "tweaks" one
> too.

I've almost forgotten how to set up openbox now. I spent a lot of time
getting it exactly how I wanted, then stored the .config/openbox
directory in as many places as I could think of! As well as this I have
a slightly modified theme, that again is simple and uncluttered.

Any new machine I set up just gets a copy of these chucked in straight
away.

One bit I'm rather proud of is an action set up so that a double-click
on the title bar sets the dimensions of that window to 800x640 and
centres it - very useful for misbehaving apps that set oversize
windows so you can't reach the 'handles'.

-- 
Will J G

"Folderol"  wrote in message 
news:20091105233858.0cb0c4a8@debian...
>
> I did have a couple of stabs at both vi and emacs and found both of
> them infuriatingly arcane with the keyboard shortcuts for everything
> and no visible menu structure (it may have been there, but I couldn't
> find it). My 'raw' text editor of choice is therefore nano.
>

I too found the keybindings for vi a bit odd when I first tried it out but I 
also found that a little perserverence pays dividends and once you "get it" 
editing becomes very easy and quick.

I'll let nix tell how good emacs is! :-)

-- 
Geoff

On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 23:38:58 +0000
Folderol  wrote:

> I did have a couple of stabs at both vi and emacs and found both of
> them infuriatingly arcane with the keyboard shortcuts for everything
> and no visible menu structure (it may have been there, but I couldn't
> find it). My 'raw' text editor of choice is therefore nano.
> 
> I had a quick look at vixn and initial impressions are good. Simple,
> clean layout - exactly what I want for real work. I couldn't find search
> and replace. Are they there but on vi-like shorcuts?

Yes. Vixn's at that awkward stage where it does enough for my needs but
hasn't attracted enough interest from other people to persuade me to
make it "complete" when I've got other things to do. Its menus are very
underdeveloped because I've never really used vim's menus (I used the
console version as much as the GUI version). The keystrokes aren't
really any harder to learn than any other powerful text editor's,
probably easier, because you can perform complex operations by combining
simple ones.

But if you do want to learn vi, start with vim and graduate to vixn
later, because vim has a good tutorial, while vixn only has
auto-generated HTML crib-sheets.

> Seeing as we're talking re-tread RISC-OS, drag 'n drop load and save
> would be nice :)

I think it does drag'n'drop loading. I could add saving too if it caught
on with the ROX community, but I'm not sure whether that works with
other file managers.

> Hmm, throwback. Now you're teasing aren't you!

No, I really did add a good throwback system because I was desperate for
one. You still have to run make/gcc from within the text editor of
course, but it's quite easy for it to parse the errors and warnings. As
long as you're using GNU make and gcc of course!

> > > > [1] I don't know why GNOME still uses it as the default window manager.
> > > > It's a botched experiment attempting to prove that it's impossible to
> > > > write a window manager that's flexible, friendly and consistent, and
> > > > maintainable, which is all proven wrong by xfwm4.
> > > 
> > > I'm an openbox user myself. I have very precise demands on how my WM
> > > behaves and this one works for me. 
> > 
> > I quite like that one too, but all its themes are almost identical and
> > it needs quite a lot of tedious text editing to make it behave sensibly,
> > whereas I can set up xfwm4 with a few clicks. IIRC I can even do it all
> > with its standard config tool without having to run the "tweaks" one
> > too.
> 
> I've almost forgotten how to set up openbox now. I spent a lot of time
> getting it exactly how I wanted, then stored the .config/openbox
> directory in as many places as I could think of! As well as this I have
> a slightly modified theme, that again is simple and uncluttered.
> 
> Any new machine I set up just gets a copy of these chucked in straight
> away.
> 
> One bit I'm rather proud of is an action set up so that a double-click
> on the title bar sets the dimensions of that window to 800x640 and
> centres it - very useful for misbehaving apps that set oversize
> windows so you can't reach the 'handles'.
> 


-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk

On Thu, 5 Nov 2009, folderol@ukfsn.org wrote:

> On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:48:48 +0000
> Tony Houghton  wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:30:14 +0000
>> Folderol  wrote:
>> 
>> > On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:01:00 +0000
>> > Tony Houghton  wrote:
>> > 
>> > > You can drag the tabs out of gedit to get separate windows. And
>> > > of course it isn't impossible to prevent windows jumping to the
>> > > front in GNOME. Even metacity [1] can do it, but with side
>> > > effects.
>> > 
>> > I must admit I wasn't aware of that. Although I think it still
>> > doesn't allow multiple views on the same document.
>> 
>> That's a nuisance. Neither does gvim, which also doesn't let you drag
>> tabs out of their original window. These limitations, especially in
>> conjunction with browsing compiler errors, drove me to write vixn. If
>> I mention the word "Throwback" to you as an ex-RISC OS user, maybe
>> you'll be wishing you liked vi now :-).
> 
> I did have a couple of stabs at both vi and emacs and found both of
> them infuriatingly arcane with the keyboard shortcuts for everything
> and no visible menu structure (it may have been there, but I couldn't
> find it). My 'raw' text editor of choice is therefore nano.

Menus have been in emacs since around version 19 (early 1990's) either
you're running with a setup which turns it off,does 
       ESC-x menu-bar-mode
turn it on again, or you're running a very old version!
Or are you running it on a remote machine?

Robert
-- 
La grenouille songe..dans son château d'eau
Links and things http://rmstar.blogspot.com/

On 05/11/2009 00:20, Nix wrote:
> On 3 Nov 2009, Frank Peelo spake thusly:
> 
> 
>>alexd wrote:
>>
>>>Have to disagree with you there - I can't stand popup windows!
>>
>>Yes, I'm surprised more editors don't do it this way. I bought EditPad
>>Pro, years ago, on Windows, and it uses this idea. So you don't have a
>>dialogue box hiding the text that you're trying to search, getting in
>>the way. Far better to have it out of the way at the bottom. Should
>>have taken over the world by now.
> 
> 
> Emacs has done this since the 1970s. Since a bunch of very popular
> wordprocessors descended fairly directly from Emacs (notably WordStar,
> at I think a two-generation remove), it's suprising that the avoid-dialogs
> isearch-is-king idea fell so much into abeyance.

Wordstar is descended from emacs? Interesting. I came across both when a 
student, twentysomething years ago on the ACT Sirius 1. Had no problem 
using Wordstar. Couldn't get my head around emacs. Least I think it was 
emacs. Now that I have Vile (a cut-down emacsish editor) on my Psion 5, 
I really should get around to learning it... don't seem to have the 
time, though. And the Psion screen is getting quite hard to read, but 
that's probably just old age.

FP

On 10 Nov 2009, FP outgrape:

> On 05/11/2009 00:20, Nix wrote:
>> On 3 Nov 2009, Frank Peelo spake thusly:
>>
>>>Yes, I'm surprised more editors don't do it this way. I bought EditPad
>>>Pro, years ago, on Windows, and it uses this idea. So you don't have a
>>>dialogue box hiding the text that you're trying to search, getting in
>>>the way. Far better to have it out of the way at the bottom. Should
>>>have taken over the world by now.
>> Emacs has done this since the 1970s. Since a bunch of very popular
>> wordprocessors descended fairly directly from Emacs (notably WordStar,
>> at I think a two-generation remove), it's suprising that the avoid-dialogs
>> isearch-is-king idea fell so much into abeyance.
>
> Wordstar is descended from emacs? Interesting. I came across both when

I think so, though I can't be sure where I got the info from (email from
JWZ, perhaps, many years ago). Old and faded memory, maay be wrong :)

> a student, twentysomething years ago on the ACT Sirius 1. Had no
> problem using Wordstar. Couldn't get my head around emacs. Least I
> think it was emacs.

It's just like WordStar except the keybindings are different and it's
far more customizable (and far more user-hostile unless you customize
it, I must have ten thousand lines of elisp customizing mine now).

>                     Now that I have Vile (a cut-down emacsish editor)
> on my Psion 5, I really should get around to learning it... don't seem
> to have the time, though. And the Psion screen is getting quite hard
> to read, but that's probably just old age.

I suspect Psion 5s have way little memory. Wikipedia says 4--16Mb, which
is seriously pushing it for Emacs: it needs 10Mb or so just to start
up. By modern standards Emacs is quite trim (certainly compared to hogs
like Eclipse), but that still means 50--100Mb if heavily used. If you're
using something like Gnus the memory usage goes way up (my XEmacs is
using 417Mb right now and I've seen it in the 800Mb range before).