Tuesday 17 June 2014

borkenmacs

Emacs is giving me the shits today. It always used to be rock-solid but over the last few years the maintainers have been breaking shit left right and centre.

  • Indenting is slower than it used to be (and it was already pretty slow) and keeps breaking all the time - I have to keep quitting a file when it decides it's lost the plot and reload it;
  • Some fool thought that a line-oriented text-editor should track the cursor by visual lines by default;
  • c-macro-expand comes broken as packaged with a useless error message whenever you run it (incorrect cpp definition);
  • Locally rendered text bitmaps. i.e. slow text rendering, and slow as all shit over remote X11. And no misc-fixed fonts unless you hunt for them - i.e. shit fonts;
  • Shitty menu's and a really pointless toolbar that need to be turned off. The toolbar often breaks focus if it's left on;
  • Crappy colours, but then again most GNU/linux tools suffer from that and it's probably more to do with distro wank.

Some of it can be fixed by local configuration, but the rest is probably best fixed by going back to a previous version and compiling without the gtk+ toolkit.

Update: Oh i almost forgot because I haven't seen it in a while, bloody undo got broken at some point. It's particularly broken on ubuntu for some reason (where I just saw it, I don't normally use ubuntu but that's what parallella uses). Sometimes editing a file you can only undo a few lines. This is particularly bad if it's in the middle of a kill-yank-undo cycle as you can end up with unrecoverably lost work.

For a text editor I can think of no higher sin.

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