begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 07:57:13PM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > > >Is there no way to do get it NOT to pester you with interactive dialog? > > Prompting != dialog.
When it deletes what I've written so far when it prompts me for the next bit of information, it is. > It just drops a help note down in the bottom line. If you remember the > sequence of stuff, great. Punch it in at maximum speed and emacs cooks > along just fine. If you don't, great. There's a little explanation > about what to do next on that same line. ...but I don't get to view what I'm about to do before it's to be done. (Well, perhaps there's a magic sequence that will let me review the expression before I execute it and I never found it, but that's another matter.) Seriously, most of the time when I type :%s/something/somethingelse/g, I glance over what I wrote to make sure it's what I really wish to do. Often, 'somethingelse' is very carefully based on 'something', and if I can't see both at once, I'd end up writing it down on a piece of paper first. > >And confirming each and every substitution is not conducive for making > >me a happy camper. There are times when I want interactivity, and there > >are times when I just want the tool to do what I tell it to and shut up. > > And the bottom line tells you how to do a single replacement, skip, or > do the full "replace everything please." Not in the version I tried. (I found a machine with emacs installed just to try it out to remind myself of my "issues".) > Again, if you want to jam in the keystrokes, you can do that too. > > One of the things that helps with emacs is that you can use the > memorized keystrokes, but you also get some discoverability if you do > not know them yet. That sounds great in theory, and has never, ever, worked for me. I've never given emacs more than a month at a time, however. I suspect that vi was just so a great fit to my brain that it locked itself in and burned out any emacs-compliant circuits in my brain. -- _Learning GNU Emacs_ is on my shelf. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
