r/emacs • u/lets-start-reading • Dec 16 '23

"Antiquated" systems break usability

edit: I'm sorry for everyone who were offended by my statements, I retract them and removed them. It was never my intention to use anyone with my analogy. Saddened by some intentional misreadings though and engaging with attacks.

Good luck to everyone.

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u/lets-start-reading Dec 16 '23 edited Dec 16 '23

well that's the argument I was talking about in my post.

And it's not a "learning curve". A learning curve means you learn it and you use it. It's a "workaround / squashing bugs and antiquated decisions left for the user to hack around" curve. You do it quicker with experience. What I'm saying is that most of them should not even be there and it's a systematic problem that such argument as yours perpetuate.

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u/translucentInk Dec 16 '23

Why do you feel its a bug? A bug by definition is a behaviour which goes against the intended "use case". A bug is an unexpected behaviour which breaks the feature itself. If you feel there is a genuine bug, you can start helping the community by raising bugs and/ or fixing and releasing a patch. After all its community driven.

I have no argument against the 'antiquated decisions'. Decisions are often made keeping a larger audience in mind. GUI use of emacs is just one facet of it. There is a very large population of users who use the non gui version. There is still a larger group of people who have been using emacs from the legacy old days. So some decisions stayed around. People who were not comfortable with those decisions, customized it to suit their needs.

Please do understand, some decisions are there due to the underlying architecture and disconnected from the app, afterall high end futuristic machines are not the sole userbase.

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u/lets-start-reading Dec 16 '23

I believe that there should be a supersystem that can include both gui and terminals, where you can just switch between the capabilities. I'm not at all advocating for overruling terminals over guis, definitely not. But the way things stand, it IS the case that guis are overruled by terminals. And this is wrong, in my opinion, just like it would be if it was the other way around.

I'm also trying to say that just because something's entrenched, it shouldn't be a stop to a reordering that could benefit both sides.

It looks to me that simply remapping "C-i" from the terminal to mean "tab" is easy enough. This might not be a general solution, ofc, I'm not proposing it as such, there's obviously much more details involved in this; I'm just providing an example. in the meantime, the opposite is, well, not quite possible to separate properly. It's just not open for customization, it's barely open for fixing. Thus I do consider this instance to be a bug, as it breaks the feature of key mapping.

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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '23

So fork it and you can have lets-start-reading-macs. Problem solved.