Copying Lines, not killing

http://www.emacsblog.org/2009/05/18/copying-lines-not-killing/

by twampss • 17 years ago

11 19 17 years ago

r00k• 17 years ago

Honestly, this was one of emacs' defaults that caused me to give it up and go back to vim. Also being forced to type out 'yes' completely to quit.

Vim is the kind of editor that never makes you type three characters where one would do. Or delete some text and then paste it back as the only means to 'copy.' It's about efficiency down to its bones.

Now, I'm well aware these things are customizable in emacs, but they're shipped as defaults. This implies the community thinks they're best, and belies a mentality that I just can't get with ("more keystrokes? no problem").

dimitar• 17 years ago

(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)

buugs• 17 years ago

Emacs is not Vim, and when people start to get that they can essentially change anything they want they actually start to enjoy emacs. And Defaults are almost never a best thought opinion but a compromise.

silentbicycle4• 17 years ago

> This implies the community thinks they're best

In some cases, it just serves as a reminder about Stallman's incredible stubbornness. (transient-mark-mode, for one) The defaults are easy to change, at least.

Also, not to feed the trolls, but it seems like with Emacs vs. vim arguments, people are usually talking past each other. In general, it sounds like Emacs users are happy to have an easily extensible environment, and the vim users enjoy using such a terse and efficient text editor.

There's nothing contradictory there!

An editor could do both, there just hasn't been a sufficiently popular synthesis of their strong points, yet. (Right?)

DannoHung• 17 years ago

I really think it's more that people have one mind or the other about things.

Some people like to easily have their editor do a lot of stuff for them, some people would rather do a lot of stuff in their editor easily. There are vi modes for emacs and vim has a pretty good scripting language for add-ons (ain't no emacs though).

I've heard of at least one project that aims to do both, but that one's written in Haskell, so you'll probably not have all that many people using it anyhow.

shachaf• 17 years ago

Well, there's VIPER...

But as a vim user, I like the way that vim works with minimal configuration. Yes, I could configure emacs to behave any way I'd like -- in fact, I generally like doing that sort of thing -- but as long as I'm really configuring my editor, I don't want to start with a horribly messy system like Emacs (and Elisp -- dynamic scoping?). Not to mention that I can't stand the default keybindings, and all sorts of extensions aren't quite as friendly to set up once you've deviated from the defaults significantly (such as in VIPER).

Vim may be a "temporary" solution for me in that it's not as configurable as I'd like (I don't like Vimscript either, but I don't use it!). However, as "temporary" solutions go, it's very good at what it does (editing text, and that's it). I wouldn't dream of running an IRC client inside it, though.

almost• 17 years ago

Doesn't that just replace C-kC-y with C-cC-k? Given that C-cC-k is used by various major modes to do mode-specific killing this doesn't seem like a good trade.

ajross• 17 years ago

I was just about to point out the same thing myself. This is just dumb -- you add keystrokes to save typing or to simplify a metaphor. This complicates the metaphor (decide between cut and copy), saves nothing (actually it's harder to type for those with ctrl bound properly -- K/Y can be done with two fingers of the same hand), and pollutes the space of key bindings to boot.

That said, it's a nice tutorial on how to set a global binding. They just should have worked harder on picking a useful example.

aristus2• 17 years ago

    (global-set-key "\M-w"  'copy-region-as-kill)

There's a core Emacs function that does this. It's confusingly called copy-region-as-kill, and it's bound to C-INSERT and f16 by default. I bind it to Meta-W.

mlLK• 17 years ago

I was about to point out the same thing; his post reads like Goldilocks discovering the three bears, but to be honest I never even knew of this [quick]copy-region-as-kill since I've always just set markers in order to delete more than one line. Flagging for RTFM fail.

silentbicycle4• 17 years ago

This is one of many reasons I wish Emacs lisp had a reasonable namespace mechanism, rather than just a somewhat haphazardly applied verb-noun naming convention. Copy/kill/yank/etc. commands could be collected, movement commands together, etc. (Even if only aliases.)

Emacs periodically surprises me by already having some minor function I wanted, but half the time it's only surprising because it's named something unusual (compared to both other programming environments and the rest of Emacs). I can never remember what the commands are called for "get (point) for beginning / end of line", just that they're named something I can't find by searching apropos with anything that comes to mind, so I use something like

  (defun end-of-line-point ()
    (save-excursion (end-of-line) (point)))

instead.

While, on the one hand, it's nice to be able to extend the editor so easily, solving the underlying problem wouldn't detract from its extensibility in any way. Sticking everything in one namespace also leads to function-with-unnecessarily-cumbersome-name syndrome. (C has the same problem, though.)

Maybe one of these days I'll quit whining and just write another editor, but any real competition to Emacs has a lot of functionality to match, and most of the other historical cruft is easy enough to tolerate.

aristus2• 17 years ago

Imagine a 20-minute song that had to contain a riff from every musical fad from the end of the Carter era to the present. :)

I was going to post my thoughts on the impossibility of a (require 'sane-emacs) but then I found this document on "Emacs2010": http://code.google.com/p/emacs2010/wiki/DeveloperIntro

jcapote• 17 years ago

Whats wrong with highlighting a region, and doing M-w on it, then yanking it back in?

mannicken• 17 years ago

C-space, C-e, M-w. Three freaking commands.

randrews• 17 years ago

I had this same problem, and I solved it thusly:

  (defun duplicate-line ()
    "Duplicate the line the point is on, moving the point to the duplicate"
    (interactive)
    (save-excursion
      (kill-new (buffer-substring (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)))
      (end-of-line)
      (newline)
      (yank)
      (rotate-yank-pointer 1))
    (next-line 1))

I'm sure there's a better way to do that (this is one of the first elisp things I ever wrote), but the general idea is that you duplicate the line the point is on, and then move the point down one line. It's surprisingly useful, more so than copying a line to the kill ring.

jderick• 17 years ago

While we are on emacs, check this out:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/key-chord.el

It lets you bind commands to "chords." For example, I bind pressing U and I at the same time to 'other-window (typically, C-x o).

Copying Lines, not killing

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