more.

on page 30, you tell us about cua-rect.el, which is fabulous and I didn't
know about it and frequently want it.
It will now become part of my tool kit.
It is unrelated to cua (except for choice of keystrokes), since it is based
on the file rect.el

Rich

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 7:22 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32@gmail.com> wrote:

> I told the students they have to use Emacs, and decided to write up
> slides for that.
>
> http://pj.freefaculty.org/guides/Rcourse/emacs-ess/emacs-ess.pdf
>
> Title "Emacs Has No Learning Curve."
>
> I argue against the general option, which seems to be that Emacs is
> too difficult and we all need to use RStudio or other IDEs that are
> designed to run on cell phones.
>
> I think the Emacs tutorial and most Emacs help sheets are causing a
> problem.  They try to teach people how to use Emacs without a mouse or
> arrow keys or page down keys. At the current time, It is simply not
> necessary for many users to remember how to change the active buffer
> with a keyboard.  The mouse & menu approach is good enough for most
> people almost all the time.  If we put a few properly chosen settings
> in .emacs, Emacs can be just about as convenient as any other editor
> in the modern desktop world, and it is many times more powerful.
>
> I wonder if this theme is bothersome to you?  If you were learning
> Emacs today, would you really try to memorize keyboard navigation
> keys?  Ex: C-v to go to the "next screen" (that's the first thing in
> Emacs tutorial). I don't think somebody who finished high school after
> 1990 has even the slightest idea of what "screen" means in a terminal
> context. Just hit "page down" and forget about it!
>
> If you have ideas for more ESS highlights, please let me know. I think
> the C-c C-d and C-c C-l trick is the neatest feature ever.  But most
> of the other ESS stuff is pretty obvious from the GUI layout. I did
> not write anything about using gdb with C functions inside R packages.
> If I ever master that, I suppose I'll have to write another slideshow.
>
> pj
>
> --
> Paul E. Johnson
> Professor, Political Science    Assoc. Director
> 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504     Center for Research Methods
> University of Kansas               University of Kansas
> http://pj.freefaculty.org            http://quant.ku.edu
>
> ______________________________________________
> ESS-help@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-help
>

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