Emacs goes Too Far

I like emacs.  I will learn to like the latest release.  Given my thoughts on the source of it all, I should expect some surprise in every release, and so far I've been lucky.  Colour me surprised at the emacs 23.1 which we get with RHEL6 and Centos6.  Its new features and updated lisp parts falls flat on its face the first time I load two files at invocation (or hit'o' in a dired):

It splits the window horizontally.

I don't know who thought that was a great idea, but it's got two problems:  First, it's going to turn off emacs noobs who wonder what the hell happened to their editor and how to make it stop, which is something the anti-emacs crowd has been pushing as a theme the whole time.  The second part, much like the first, is that is makes the editor look like ass and work like crap.  So we're also looking to make it fucking stop.

The popular fix is to tune the criteria for auto-splitting windows out of whack.

--- .emacs~     2011-09-11 16:15:56.000000000 -0700
+++ .emacs      2011-10-30 05:01:43.000000000 -0700
@@ -367,3 +367,7 @@
  '(font-lock-builtin-face ((((type tty) (class color)) (:foreground "light blue" :weight light))))
  '(nxml-attribute-value-face ((t (:inherit nxml-delimited-data-face))))
  '(nxml-delimited-data-face ((((class color) (background light)) (:foreground "LightBlue")))))
+
+;; witty and biting comment about sudden feature changes that look like
+;; broken parts that frighten noobs here.  I probably said Fuck again.
+(setq split-height-threshold 0)
+(setq split-width-threshold nil)

Instead of saying "don't ever split the window horizontally, you whackjob app," we just say "sorry you can't split the window horizontally because our criteria is now impossible to match."  That's the fix.  Now, your fancy old Emacs does exactly what it used to, and you don't have to worry about it looking bad and scaring the officemates back into the 1960s with vi.

I should roll a fix for it on the system level, so that it avoids it for all users of a particular system.  Stay tuned and, if it doesn't appear soon, beat me.

Smartest Guy in the Room

So I'm at the sweatshop today, and HB's logged into a box. He's doing some 8-key sequence and I think he's trying to move to a previous command.

"What was that," I ask, perplexed.
"I was trying to repeat a command," he answers.
"But how?  You were doing an odd key combination there."
"That was an Escape-K combination I did.  Once or twice."

And it struck me.  That's the old korn-and-vi way of doing things, and I'd just not noticed it.

"Why didn't you just hit Up-Arrow?" I ask
"Oh, I'm so used to the old way"
"Ahh, you're a vi guy, then?"

It was a bit of a leap, but I think that's how vi people go up a line (because it's just intuitive to hit ESC-K for 'up').  He admitted that he was, but here's the money-byte:

"No matter where I go, the smartest guy in the room uses Emacs.  I need to learn emacs one day because there's got to be something to it."
(over my protests) "No, really:  everywhere I go, there's like 10 people in a hack lab, and the genius people, the smartest guys there, have all been emacs guys.  It's weird, but it's true."

And thus my plan - to approach genius by emulating it and copying their habits - has been revealed.  Like those 1980s guys who said you should act rich if you wanted to be rich,  could I really resemble a smart guy just by doing what smart guys do?

Nah.

I only use emacs because I had a choice between it and vi in the beginning.  I like to think that's all I needed, since I like to hit the up-arrow to, well, go up.  I guess I can't work with something as intuitive as [ESC][K], that marvel of efficiency and intuitive design.