Re: [h-e-w] EmacsW32, gnuserv, pathes in .emacs

[David Vanderschel]

On Thursday, July 13, "Nat Goodspeed" <address@hidden> wrote:
>At 11:13 AM 7/13/2006, Stephen F. Heffner wrote:
>>FWIW, there are those of us who are fast touch typists, and we don't want to
>>remove our fingers from the main keyboard; it slows
>>things down a lot.  ...

>   Very true. But (a) it actively discourages newcomers, and (b) I
>still suspect that the reason has more to do with ASCII terminals
>than with fast typists...

I don't think so.  The primary issue, as Stephen
wrote, is that removing one's fingers from the home
position slows things down and causes mistakes.  Even
the ASCII terminals had extra function keys.  

When I first started using emacs, I was coming from
DEC's EDT text editor and I was still constrained by a
VT100-like ASCII terminal.  It was convenient for me
to adopt the EDT emulation mode, which did exploit the
extra function keys.  As I became more accustomed to
Emacs, I started using some of the regular Emacs
bindings precisely because they did not necessitate
removing my fingers from the home keys.

There was a point in my career (around '90) when there
was a lapse in my access to Emacs.  When I was able to
return to Emacs after a couple years, I decided to
drop my EDT 'crutch', as I found it awkward to use
somebody else's installation of Emacs.  I gave up EDT
mode entirely.  I have never regretted it.  (I think
the only remnant of EDT in my current setup is that my
M-d deletes up to the beginning of the next
whitespace-delimited word instead of through the end
of the current word where "end of word" is in Emacs's
sense (which can be delimited by lots of things in
addition to whitespace).  I do have another way to
delete the current word in the Emacs sense when that
is what I actually want to do.)

Regards,
  David V.