Alexandre Oliva on Nostr: I'm glad you can see that. history and legacy require a huge amount of propaganda to ...
I'm glad you can see that. history and legacy require a huge amount of propaganda to suppress in visibility, but it's still there for anyone with enough reflection to perceive it.
I had used GNU on sun's flavors of unix for years before I first became responsible for a university lab with GNU/Linux-running machines, and the transition was quite trivial, since I had relied mainly GNU on both.
years later, I had a chance to boot up a 1991 MCC Interim on qemu, and it felt just like the green-phosphor terminal I had used in my first contact with GNU in 1991. as Mr Torvalds himself acknowledged early on, Linux alone isn't useful, you needed GNU's copylefted programs to make it useful, and that combination is what sparked the flame and spread like fire, because it was indeed great, user-serving and infinitely adaptable software.
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as for info vs manual pages, the contrast is IMHO not so much about the technology but about the implementation thereof. my previous experience with GNU on top of SunOS and Solaris was that Sun's manuals were very well-written, and reading the manual pages on the terminal or on printed books was a good way to learn how to use various programs.
now, GNU programs had man pages as well, but they were simplified and minimized usage documentation, whereas complete manuals were in a different, printable but more hypertextual form (long before HTML came to exist)
unfortunately, other programs written for GNU/Linux by people who weren't in line with GNU's high documentation standards did away with the more complete manuals, and followed the poor practice of minimal man pages, often generated mechanically from -h/--help (formerly +help, as visible in MCC Interim) output
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Emacs keybindings are indeed an important convenience and consistency feature for various GNU programs, but the keybindings are just a minuscule part of influence I wish Emacs philosophy of "batteries, tools, manuals and extensibility included" had become even more prevalent. the ability to tune Emacs to one's liking, the architecture that enables one to modify its internals non-intrusively, to script and automate various tasks from keystroke macros to lisp fragments, is something I wish many more programs would expose to users. the vision of doing so with guile was unfortunately not as widely adopted as I'd have liked, but though lisp is a convenient language to that end, perhaps make various other languages pluggable would have made it more desirable and useful to many more users. imagine scripting boring tasks in the programs you use the most with such scripting languages as python, javascript, lua or whatever suits you, and activating those scripted actions with short keystrokes! I'd love that aspect of GNU Emacs's influence to be more widely adopted!
I had used GNU on sun's flavors of unix for years before I first became responsible for a university lab with GNU/Linux-running machines, and the transition was quite trivial, since I had relied mainly GNU on both.
years later, I had a chance to boot up a 1991 MCC Interim on qemu, and it felt just like the green-phosphor terminal I had used in my first contact with GNU in 1991. as Mr Torvalds himself acknowledged early on, Linux alone isn't useful, you needed GNU's copylefted programs to make it useful, and that combination is what sparked the flame and spread like fire, because it was indeed great, user-serving and infinitely adaptable software.
-
as for info vs manual pages, the contrast is IMHO not so much about the technology but about the implementation thereof. my previous experience with GNU on top of SunOS and Solaris was that Sun's manuals were very well-written, and reading the manual pages on the terminal or on printed books was a good way to learn how to use various programs.
now, GNU programs had man pages as well, but they were simplified and minimized usage documentation, whereas complete manuals were in a different, printable but more hypertextual form (long before HTML came to exist)
unfortunately, other programs written for GNU/Linux by people who weren't in line with GNU's high documentation standards did away with the more complete manuals, and followed the poor practice of minimal man pages, often generated mechanically from -h/--help (formerly +help, as visible in MCC Interim) output
-
Emacs keybindings are indeed an important convenience and consistency feature for various GNU programs, but the keybindings are just a minuscule part of influence I wish Emacs philosophy of "batteries, tools, manuals and extensibility included" had become even more prevalent. the ability to tune Emacs to one's liking, the architecture that enables one to modify its internals non-intrusively, to script and automate various tasks from keystroke macros to lisp fragments, is something I wish many more programs would expose to users. the vision of doing so with guile was unfortunately not as widely adopted as I'd have liked, but though lisp is a convenient language to that end, perhaps make various other languages pluggable would have made it more desirable and useful to many more users. imagine scripting boring tasks in the programs you use the most with such scripting languages as python, javascript, lua or whatever suits you, and activating those scripted actions with short keystrokes! I'd love that aspect of GNU Emacs's influence to be more widely adopted!