Emacs, I Already Broke It

You may have to use Escape codes...look up the old ASCII tables for use with serial terminals.

John

You mean the three or four character codes used in VT100 terminals? That ain't happening! At least, not if I have to type them in. Will the terminal emulator know to send these multi-character codes when I press Alt-whatever?

Do you mean like these?

The disclaimer at the bottom says "Some word processors will not recognize these ALT functions". You might have just have to find the manual...

John

This is why I use Eclipse.

People who like emacs or vi (there are two camps) are VERY facile at navigating using the keyboard, and sneer at us mere mortals who like to use mice.

Indeed. There are two camps because in vi, your fingers rest over the home keys, whereas everything fancy in emacs seems to be Control-Shift-Meta-Left-Elbow-

:)

I remember using the old DEC type terminals. I was a wiz at flying over the keys around the number pad. But that was a long time ago and I much prefer what I know more recently, although fingers still have to leave the home position to get to the arrow keys. On top of that, for some unknown reason, all the new laptop keyboards have *no* feel for the various keys. It's like they are compelled to make them more attractive and less function. My last laptop had keys with space around them so I could feel where the home key was. Now I have to reach, guess and if all else fails - look! I think taking my eyes off the screen is worse than moving my fingers from the home position.

Emacs seems to have some odd conventions, but I expect once I learn and use them a bit they will become handy. I'm just so used to thinking in terms of the Windows CUA.

You don't use the pedals?

Emacs is a great editor/operating system, but there are better ones if you want to use mouse. I'm even using it as usenet client.

I would not count Alt-V working over serial port, I'm mostly using Ctrl-combos with occassional M-x (Esc-x then enter command) stuff.

Even though I strongly prefer Emacs, learning VI/VIM is much more useful for limited communications channels. VI is much more commonly available on small and embedded systems. Pico/nano are also quite common, but I stay away from them.

Most important, you have to learn those editors when you are young, so you can enter the commands without even thinking. I am a vi user and I cannot operate emacs, and after using abominations like GNU Info I really don't want to think about learning it.

On the other hand, people cannot see how I can do so much in vi when the commands are all gibberish.

page-up page-down should still work, that tutorial was written for

yeah, if your terminal is compatible. ssh is more common than serial port, but the channel has similar features.