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by JoshTriplett
2236 days ago
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I'm not trying to say this is the most critical problem; I'm saying it's one example of many, and it spends a lot of "weirdness budget" without necessarily providing value in exchange. "kill/yank" is another example, and there are many more where those come from; the volume of them creates a "thousand papercuts" problem. In the Rust language design, we're careful about what we spend our "weirdness budget" on. We've already spent a fair bit of it on terms related to ownership and borrowing, because those are fundamental and central to the language. We spent some on having a one-character '?' operator for error-checking, because error-checking occurs so often. But we're not going to gratuitously introduce new vocabulary for existing concepts that already have a name people would be more familiar with, and we're extremely hesitant to introduce gratuitous syntax abbreviations just so people can type a little less, because they'd be harder to read and understand. |
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That said, as someone who very slowly got into Emacs and now am full on into it, all this weirdness slowly became more of a an, oh this actually makes a lot of sense, and, you know what, I might like it better.
I still find it weird for a frame to be a window and a window a frame. But logically, I think the Emacs names make more sense. The thing with a frame is a frame, and the sections within it are the windows. I wouldn't mind if it was renamed frame to window and window to panes tough.
Similarly, C-c and M-m used to confuse me a lot. But now I find them way nicer, why have to type all of Ctrl and alt. Also on Mac alt is called command, so having a Meta as a more generic name for the key kind of works.
Kill was weird to me, until I realized kill and delete both exist, but behave differently. There's a kill-ring, text that is killed go in it, text that is deleted doesn't. When you program extensions this is a very important distinction. You don't want programmatic edits to all go in the kill ring and polute it.
Would it be nicer if the more common user used one, which is kill, be named delete which is more familiar to people maybe.
Like I said, I wouldn't mind someone making a big refactor of it all and renaming everything to be less weird to modern times, but I think as you learn those "weirdness" they stop being weird.
Basically, I mean there's a big difference between a quirk, and just something you're not familiar with. I think Emacs names are mostly unfamiliar.
Emacs also has real quirks though, and I think those are more important to address. Like there's a lot of legacy cruft, having to still support working on defunct terminals, and all kind of stuff. Like ESC being a weird Meta key because of terminals that don't support meta. Or the entire UX which is crap by default.