Xah Lee, 2008-05-29
Stevey Yegge, a programer, has written a a very popular blog article called Effective Emacs (2006) Source. I disagree with 3 of his tips strongly. This page documents them.
These tips i disagree strongly:
In the following, i give a brief explanation of why.
Swapping Caps Lock and Control is not a good solution because it puts all the burden on the left pinky. The Control key on most PC keyboard is at the corner, and is very easy to press with palm. Also, there are 2 Control keys, on both sides. One should use them both like how Shift key is used, by using one hand for the modifier key and the other hand for the letter key. Using both hands avoids the awkward pinky-stretch, and using both left and right Control keys lessens the repetitive burden on one hand. Swapping Caps Lock and Control can be a good solution on laptop keyboards. I think better is to actually swap Control and Alt. For detail, see Why You Should Not Swap Caps Lock With Control.
By the same reasoning above, i don't find the advice “Invoking Meta+x by remapping Alt to a Control key combination” a very good one. Personally, i remap Meta+x to Meta+a, since the “a” key is in the home row, and Meta (the Alt key under thumb) is easier to press than Control.
Steve advices users to “Lose the UI”. In general, i also work in emacs exclusively using keyboard. In my first 6 years of using emacs, from 1998 to 2004, i use it inside text-terminals (thru telnet/ssh on remote servers). Only after 2004, i started to use emacs in a graphical user interfce, under Mac OS X. I think graphical user interface is very helpful, because the menu lets a user see the most useful commands, and can serve as a reminder or cheat-sheet. For example, i've been using dired for over 10 years. Some of dired features i've never used. For example, looking at the dired “Operate” menu, i see that i've actually never used the shortcuts S, H, B, L, T, C-t D, C-t a, C-t t, C-t r. Under its “Mark” menu, i've never used “* /”, “.”, “* *”, “M-{”, “M-}”. Similarly, there are many commands i've never used, or aware, that are listed under its Regexp, Immediate, Subdir menus. Maybe i've been missing out something, but emacs has 3000+ commands and lots of modes. Few people need to master all features. But occasionally, i can browse the graphical menu and find out the command that i kept forgetting to use, or see what most important commands are available for a new mode i just installed. I think graphical menus are quite useful in this aspect. Losing them saves at most 2 lines of space, and today's monitors are too big and cheap to be of concern. I would agree that tool bar (the one with icons for opening file, copy/cut/paste, printing, help) is not very useful. (you can take off the tool-bar by using the menu 〖Options▸Show/Hide▸Tool-bar〗 then 〖Options▸Save Options〗.)
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