ObfusCo > The List > emacs

Emacs Blog

Emacs

• 39) When emacs redraws on a certain machine I'm using remotely, it sometimes doesn't repaint correctly. This has led to quite a bit of confusion because I'm trying to examine log files, and digits relevant to ordering in time are getting screwed up. If I repaint enough it eventually looks sane, but often I'm moving around in the file and end up seeing broken values. Nice! (Maybe the fault of any of several elisp libraries I installed to help with code formatting?)
• 38) If you are editing a file, and want to see what is in the same directory, you have to remove the trailing slash from the path you see in "find file" in the minibuffer. Otherwise, it revisits the same file. Total usability suck; how can it make sense for the path to not have the name of a file in it, yet reload a file?
• 37) Tabbing is all screwy. Sometimes it will really insert a tab. Sometimes it will insert spaces. Sometimes it will try to line things up with previous indentation. Sometimes it will make up some random amount to indent. It is basically all just crap.
• 36) For sure, html-helper-mode can't even handle nested lists; things don't indent more, they just get flushed all the way to the left. Whatever!
• 35) Apparently, html-helper-mode has a limit on the number of lines in a block it can handle before it decides to just entirely give up on indenting, something around 33 lines? And even if that is not the reason for it freaking out, it certainly doens't offer me any feedback that would explain why it is freaking out, so I have no way of really debugging it. Great! Ship it!
• 34) One thing that I thought I really like about Emacs was that in any situation you could always just ^G a lot and get back to some sane state. However, I have since learned things which destroy such dreamy illusions of usability. To wit, you can have the minibuffer in some mode, then switch the cursor's buffer, then ^G and the minibuffer can still be in the mode you were in, rather than getting cleared out to no mode.
• 33) When doing a search-replace with a multi-line string, the minibuffer is woefully inadequate.
• 32) Doing 'capitalize-word' on a word in single quotes apparently tries to upcase the quote character, so your word doesn't get capitalized. Genius!
• 31) It kills me when I have a buffer with a filename in it, and I'm trying to load that file into a new buffer, so I'm typing it into the minibuffer and then using completion brings up a list of possible filename matches... overwriting the original buffer I was looking at that tells me which file I want. So now I don't know which of the completions to choose. Great.
• 30) I love how some functions toggle stuff, and start with "toggle-" in their name, yet it isn't "toggle-menu-bar", it is "menu-bar-mode" (and some argument that... acts like a boolean). Whatever.
• 29) I have yet to find an even halfway decent XML mode for Emacs. So I figured Clark's couldn't be much better (or worse). Well, it looks like it actually doens't suck! My sample size is one, but it worked for me.
• 28) Anybody who has tried to customize Emacs would have to admit that the whole customization system is a stinking pile of fragile poo (if that makes sense). It just plain sucks ass, no doubt about it. The complexity is out of hand. The interaction of all the parts has gotten out of hand - it's like when prescription drugs interact in nasty, nasty ways. A fundamental issue is that there isn't a good way to know what the hell is going on when something goes wrong. An example: I'm trying mmm-mode's html-js mode, with javascript being done in c-mode. If I don't use mmm, but just use c-mode for the html file (so at least the javascript gets formatted nicely) then it isn't too bad. When I turn on mmm-mode + html-js, it does magically appear to be switching modes, but! But! The coloring is completely broken. I have light text on a dark background, and the c-mode under mmm + html-js is suddenly light text on a light background! This is from nowhere! So, the whole mmm thing is completely useless to me. Like I'm going to spend the time to figure out what insane Elisp crap is causing this? This all smells like something other than Shinola, I'll tell ya.
• 27) Perl mode should flash the matching regexp delimiter (which is usually '/').
• 26) When it says, "please wait, making up gcc man page..." the entire program locks up and I can't do diddly. That's bloody genius, folks.
• 25) It drives me crazy that moving forward by a few whole words, and then backwards by a few whole words might not put you in the same place. So if you go one too far, going one in the opposite direction doesn't get you back where you were. Personally, I think that sucks ass from a usability perspective. Also, it always seems like the choice of 'word' boundary determinants leaves a lot to be desired in programming language modes.
• 24) Couldn't they remember where the cursor was in that (sub)frame, rather than in that buffer? I often want to have 2 views onto the same file, looking at 2 different places in the file, and Emacs does its damndest to put me back in a unified place when I switch away to another buffer then back. Hate.
• 23) I'm glad that my spanking new Linux install in 2005 still can't get copy text from Emacs and paste into Firebird. I've seen some suggested fixes but they haven't worked magic for me. Grn. I tried using the mouse to drag, and even using 'copy' from the Emacs 'File' menu, no luck. Apparently, only the middle mouse button type of paste has any chance of working, argh!
• 22) In dired mode, it bugs me that sorting causes the cursor to go to the end of the buffer since the reason I am sorting is always to see what is newest, which is at the top.
• 21) It is just great how Emacs has at least 3 different ways to ask, "Are you sure?" It can require you to enter 'yes'/'no', it can ask for 'y'/'n', or it can require that you press the Enter key.
• 20) Emacs can do coloring of text in files based on syntax, which is nice. But it totally screws the pooch when recoloring - sure, when I start a comment with /* it will recolor everything on down as a comment but when i close with */ it fails to recolor everything that is now no longer a comment. So it looks like there is something wrong but in fact there isn't. (I think it sometimes does that with strings as well). How utterly stupid lame evil hateful is that?!
• 19) Another reason Emacs is lame - it is trying to load the whole huge file at once, rather than paging through it as I go through it. I mean, all I care about is the first screen's worth right now but I'm stuck waiting for it to try to load the whole stupid file. That's usability!
• 18) It kills me that Emacs's filename completion is stopping at the '.' even though there is only one file in the directory that matches what I have typed so far!
• 17) It bugs me that emacs on Windows doesn't hide the mouse cursor when you start typing. Lame! Lame, lame, lame, lame, lame!
• 16) The dired mode in Emacs apparently has a way to hide subdirectories (e.g.: .svn) but I haven't yet heard of a way to hide files (by regexp) in a directory. I'd really like to get rid of all the twiddle files, bleck!
• 15) Is it me, or is there no way to have Emacs ("regular" Emacs, I dunno about XEmacs) show all the line numbers? I think it can only show you the cursor's line number in the status bar, which is pretty lame for something that is used to edit source code!
• 14) I wish everything could do EMACS's "replace strings, and use the case of the string that is being replaced so I don't have to laboriously first replace all lower case ones and then all upper case ones." Argh.
• 13) Is it just me, or does Emacs not have a "save a copy as..." command already? Like, I have to write one in elisp or something? What a flying piece of excrement!
• 12) Whoever decided that Meta-Backspace in Emacs should go to the start of the line, rather than deleting the previous word, needs shot.
• 11) I think Emacs sucks stinky eggs when it comes to the whole mini-buffer thing. I want to do a textual replacement of a long string (file path) with another one. They come from different documents. So I want to copy the strings from the documents and use them as arguments to the search-replace. When it comes to getting the 2nd value, I need to switch buffers (^X-b) but that then blows everything up because the mini-buffer is already in use. Yay.
• 10) I wish I could undo "kill-buffer" in EMACS.
• 9) Whoever invented Emacs' indent-relative command is obviously working for the pink-o commies and should be summarily shot, forthwith, presto, lickety-split.
• 8) I <heart> emacs's ^x-^x (really).
• 7) I'm running Emacs on a Windows 2K box (ha ha). I want to run shell stuff. I have figured out how to tell it to use bash that I've got installed, however, when I do M-x grep, it still tries to run it in a DOS shell. I can't find info documentation that says how to fix that. Great. I <heart> computers.
• 6) Another problem with Emacs is just in dealing with all the different modes. Like, Tab is completely whacked in my MH-Letter-Fill mode, but figuring out why is a huge pain in the derriere.
• 5) So you are a new user of Emacs. Why on earth not just call it 'tutorial' rather than 'help-with-tutorial'? I mean, which is easier to remember? Stupid.
• 4) Something happened and now Emacs changes how much it indents every time I hit the tab key. Just about no two times does it indent the same amount. This is so retarded and insane I can't believe it.
• 3) Emacs is great and all, but the 'kill-word' command is kinda screwy in some cases: If you have "Foo++ Bar" then the first time you run the command, 'Foo' goes away. That's okay, I guess. The next time you run the command, rather than just the '++' going away, everything, including the ' Bar', gets deleted! That is just plain wrong because there is a space between the '++' and the 'Bar'.
• 2) If you use fill-paragraph in Emacs, even if nothing actually changes (like if you do it twice with a save inbetween) it marks the buffer as having changed.
• 1) Emacs has two different behaviours for Meta-backspace and Meta-delete. Unfortunately, it's also really lame in that if you hit Meta-backspace, it doesn't set the mark so ^X^X doesn't get you back to wher eyou were. That's stupid because things like Meta-< or Meta-> do set the mark.