Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Aug 5, 2007, 07:51 UTC
Message-ID: <85bqdmctcl.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708042127160.5037@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:
>> >
>> > None that any normal user would want to use.
>> 
>> Linus, do you really think that the editor _you_ use is used by more
>> people than Emacs?  Think again.
>
> No.
>
> But I'm also not confused enough to think that people should use 
> micro-emacs for reading man-pages.

Could you refrain from using name-calling on everybody that does not share your preferences? It is annoying to hear you talk all the time about "normal", "sane", "confused" and so on.

> The UNIX philosophy is "do one thing, and do it well".

And Emacs does text, and does it well. It is just that very much information can ultimately be viewed as text. For example, I can run grep or locate inside of Emacs. Nothing exciting. And then I can click on the lines those put out, and get moved to the corresponding line in the source code, in my editor. Again, nothing exciting, but it does not work with disconnected tools without the glue Emacs provides. There are other IDEs providing that sort of thing, but usually they work just with output they produced themselves.

Using Emacs to read man-pages means that I can grab manpage content easily with my accustomed editing commands and paste them into a mail I am composing. Without having to use a mouse or GUI.

It enables workflows that are not possible outside of it. It is ok if you don't find the tradeoff appealing, but that does not make you "normal" and other people "confused" and "insane".

So please get a grip and focus on what we were actually talking about. Not Emacs, but rather documentation formats.

> Man-pages with man.

Actually, Emacs "woman" does a pretty good job with those, offers convenient man page name completion and works on Windows and similar platforms without needing

> html with a web browser. And edit stuff with an editor.
>
> Why the *hell* do you confuse my choice of editor with my choice of
> man-page format? I didn't.

Why the hell do you keep changing the topic and go off on sideline rants.

> That whole "do everything in emacs" is a disease. And then emacs
> users think that it's "sane".

Focus. How do you propose to manage documention of a hundred pages an more conveniently, finding information easily by text, index, hyperlinks? A single large HTML page? A documentation directory full of *.txt files which you can grep through (not that Emacs would not be useful for that, too)?

How do you find all information pertaining to "remote tracking branches" in the git documentation? Explain your workflow with that, and explain why a sane person would prefer that over typing info git i remote TAB RET , , , and being taken to the respective text locations in turn.

Standalone info _is_ a single application doing a single job: navigating large hyperlinked plain text documentation efficiently. It may be an _ugly_ application, but instead of saying what you use instead in your daily workflow, you revert to name-calling.

If you have a _working_ solution to offer for that task, try presenting it instead of calling people using other tools names.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum