
If Your Car Were Emacs (2014) - aficionado
http://wiki.c2.com/?IfYourCarWereEmacs
======
anexprogrammer
...and would only be available in beige with a triangular steering wheel as
RMS wants to encourage people to bring the functionality to free vehicles.
You're welcome to fork the vehicle but until then only commercial vehicles
have colour choices and round wheels.

I'm wholly in favour of FOSS and what it stands for but I often think RMS does
more harm than good. Even when I agree with the point he's trying to make!

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napsterbr
I don't get the vi(m) vs emacs war. Vi(m) is a great editor; emacs is a great
operating system. Take the best of both worlds and enjoy spacemacs :)

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qwertyuiop924
Spacemacs is actually the worst of both worlds...

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supernintendo
If you're referring specifically to evil mode I would agree with you (and this
is coming from someone who loves and uses both Emacs and Vim regularly). I do
enjoy what Spacemacs provides from a configuration and package management
standpoint. Maintaining one file is a lot easier than maintaining entire
.emacs.d.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Actually, I was talking about the configuration layers, in part: I don't know
about you, but I'd like to know what my config is doing, dammit. Yes, my
init.el is pretty long, but I know exactly what it's doing.

~~~
flukus
That's not really the worst of both worlds though, it's a spacemacs issue that
neither emacs or vim has.

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qwertyuiop924
Well, I was also talking about various other things, but you're right.

So it's not only the worst of both worlds, it also has problems unto itself.

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nabla9
Actually, there are cars like Emacs.

Their steering wheels look like this:
[https://www.google.se/search?q=F1+car+steering+wheel&&tbm=is...](https://www.google.se/search?q=F1+car+steering+wheel&&tbm=isch)

~~~
flukus
Those are single function buttons. To be like emacs you'd have to press at
least six of them at once to do something.

~~~
nabla9
Don't forget pedals.

Some wheels have multi function rotary switches (Mercedes for example). You
use buttons to control what rotary buttons do. And rotary switches can be used
to control how gas or breaking pedals behave, so there are all kinds of Emacsy
Meta happening.

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234dd57d2c8db
Here's a link for people who don't want to run so much JS just to view a
bulleted list of text

[https://archive.fo/VgNuv](https://archive.fo/VgNuv)

~~~
napsterbr
Yeah. With all respect to Ward and his federated wiki thing, using a webapp-
ish thing for this is just plain awful.

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aroberge
"...a steering wheel you could move to the passenger side, for those trips to
Canada"

Does someone really believe that we drive on the left-hand side of the road in
Canada? Someone is really messed up in their geography.

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rfrey
From the article:

"Why would you want to do this? For countries that drive on the other side of
the road. Like Canada. But, oops: they drive on the same side of the road, not
the other side, so we see humorous bit #1: feigned American ignorance of
Canada. But oops, again: assuming a left-side steering wheel is an
AmericanCulturalAssumption - you might really want to change the side it's on
if you're British and you're driving to Canada. That's humorous bit #2: we've
caught the picky people in an unwarranted assumption (and a USAian one, at
that!). Humorous bit #3 is the sheer unlikelihood of a British (or
Japanese/Australian/Indian) person driving to Canada, after all.

That's the explanation. But it doesn't make the joke any funnier."

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JacksonGariety
I do have Emacs for a car and I call it my bicycle.

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bryanrasmussen
wouldn't that be Vi?

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JacksonGariety
No, I can tune my bike to fit me, rather than having to adapt to the bike.

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bryanrasmussen
well I guess I can tune my bike to fit me too, within limits. This principle
of limitations is why I can't tune my wife's tiny bike to fit me ( without
cutting metal and welding it together again I guess)

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galfarragem
Also interesting:

[http://wiki.c2.com/?IfYourCarWereVim](http://wiki.c2.com/?IfYourCarWereVim)

~~~
vacri
> _The first time you actually sit in the car, you have to ask a friend how to
> get out again..._

I remember that day!

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deathanatos
As a vim user, I've never understood this. Does no novice pondering how to
exit vim ever try ^C (which _seems_ perfectly natural), which outputs:

    
    
      Type  :quit<Enter>  to exit Vim
    

… and now you know.

I'll admit that not much else is discoverable, until you start learning to
peruse :help and Google.

You're not the only one[1] to express this though.

How you're supposed to discover ^X^C in emacs, though, I truly have no idea.
See also ed, and if you've not see it, Ed man! !man ed[2].

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/435555976687923200?la...](https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/435555976687923200?lang=en)

[2]: [https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-
msg.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html)

~~~
eric_the_read
Sure, _now_ , but back in the dark ages of 1992, basically nobody at my
university had heard of vim, so we just got vi, which didn't have such a
helpful prompt. After entering vi, I spent about 15 minutes alternately trying
to do anything useful and cursing at it until a helpful grad student next to
me pointed me at emacs. When I fired up emacs, by contrast, it had a helpful
message telling me to type C-h t, which ran me through a nice little tutorial
on how to use it, including C-x C-c to exit.

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randomsofr
I just see a loading gif...

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shmerl
All I see there is a rotating "loading" animation. Is it supposed to take a
very long time to load?

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karmajunkie
i think that might be the joke?

