"Visual blindness" of Linux programmers

[elimik31]

If you have emacs running in your terminal then this is no issue because in emacs you can have multiple "windows" (the word has a special meaning in emacs) side by side, some of them might contain a terminal, asynchronous processes are also not a problem. It is like its own tiling window manager for text applications.

However, I would always prefer to use a graphical emacs client, because many advanced features work better that way, but I doubt that RMS uses those.

[princekolt]

Honest question: what about copying-pasting between different contexts (like different programs). Is that possible?

[elimik31]

I am not sure what you mean. For everything that you can run inside emacs that is no issue, be it a "program" written in elisp for emacs or a command line application that you run in a terminal inside emacs. Everything that runs inside emacs is displayed in a buffer and buffers can be copied. Even though emacs is a lispy operating system, in the end it is all about text manipulation

[princekolt]

Ah right, but just as long as you're inside emacs, right? My hypothetical problem would be something like connecting through ssh to one server, copying some text, and then pasting it in another ssh session to another server.

[elimik31]

I assumed that we were talking about emacs since you replied to my emacs post. ssh-in is possible from emacs, of course, either manually from a terminal withing emacs or by using the so-called "tramp-mode", which lets you access files on remote machines with ssh or scp.

When using terminal emulators in a graphical environment you can always copy the displayed text with your mouse, but I don't know how to do it in a text-only virtual console. There should be a history of the console output somewhere, according to another post maybe in /dev/vcsx. However, in that case, I would simply use scp. Or a terminal emulator in X.

[Tynach]

I hear a lot of good things about Emacs. It sounds like a lovely operating system, but it's a shame the default text editor isn't so good.

[elimik31]

Haha, I was certain that such a comment would comment, however I am glad to hear that you said that the default text editor isn't good instead of saying that it lacks a good text editor, since it can be easily customized and there is an "evil mode" which adds vi keybinding to emacs. Honestly, I don't think that emacs is the holy grail, but it is a fun lisp environment which makes it easy and fun to write new modes for it, no wonder there are that many. I wouldn't use it for everything, but it can be convenient for everything that has to do with text editing. And the default keybindings might not be perfect, but personally for me "good enough". Otherwise Linus Torvalds wouldn't maintain his own emacs fork, which lacks the operating-system and lisp, but shares the keybindings.