[ale] Broken Keyboard, help?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 15:46 -0500, Linda L. Hull. wrote:
> Vim and I have a long standing love-hate relationship.
> Our very handsome gray and black kitten sat on my UPS power switch
> .. twice, not to mention the power failures.
> 
> The recovery from such events is not as straightforward for me
> as everyone seems to feel it should be. I have .swp and .swn and 
> even some .swo files.

As does vi(m) and myself.  I have been a user of GNU Emacs for some time
now, and rather like the way that it works.  It automatically saves
periodically, and if you experience a crash or anything, you just open
the file as normal.  GNU Emacs will let you know that there is autosave
information, and you can recover the most recently saved state by
pressing M-x (that is, Alt+X or <ESC> then X) and typing
"recover-this-file".  It will bring the buffer back to the state of the
last automatic save.  This has saved my rear end on more than one
occasion.

I certainly do not intend to start (yet another) vi/Emacs war here; just
pointing out what Emacs can do.  :)  It does have a somewhat steepish
learning curve---but then again, so does TeX/LaTeX---and once the
learning curve is out of the way, it is rather easy to work with.  It is
a godsend for anyone that works with many text files, regardless of
their contents; particularly when using a version control system.

That having been said, the last time that I seriously used vim or Unix
vi was about two years ago now.  It may well have vastly improved since
then.  I was required to use it when I was working with a previous
employer who refused to install GNU Emacs on the server systems that I
was working in.  That was fine; I can /use/ vi(m), I just don't like it
as well.  :)

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/
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