← Back to context

Comment by klibertp

10 years ago

Nothing to do with Unix, it's an Emacs thing.

In Emacs, what you nowadays call "cutting and pasting" is instead called "killing and yanking". It was called that way even before "cut" and "paste" got popularized, I think.

And the "Kill Ring" name makes sense, as it a) contains snippets of text you killed and b) when yanking (pasting) lets you cycle through all the killed snippets. You can view your kill ring in its entirety via a menu or with a plugin (kill-ring-browser or similar, I forget).

Emacs is old and brittle, but its basic editing model is very good. It does lack (without plugins) some features I learned in Vim (the most irritating thing at the beginning was a lack of "textobjects"; I still occasionally miss them, despite expand-region and other plugins), but is basically the only editor that I feel is worth learning.

16 comments

klibertp

Reply
Avshalom  10 years ago

>>In Emacs, what you nowadays call "cutting and pasting" is instead called "killing and yanking". It was called that way even before "cut" and "paste" got popularized, I think

Cut and paste refer to literal scissors/knives and glue/paste it predates the Gutenberg press.

smacktoward  10 years ago

> Nothing to do with Unix, it's an Emacs thing.

Yes, I know that. It was a joke that used the specific example of Emacs to illustrate a point about how tone-deaf Unix developers can be about UI issues.

> In Emacs, what you nowadays call "cutting and pasting" is instead called "killing and yanking". It was called that way even before "cut" and "paste" got popularized, I think.

Sure, but it's been pretty much universally referred to as "cutting and pasting" everywhere for what, two decades now? The Emacs terminology is a wart, a relic of a bygone age. There's no reason to continue using it, except inertia.

> And the "Kill Ring" name makes sense, as it a) contains snippets of text you killed

This only makes sense if you accept that there is a reason to continue referring to that interaction as "killing" rather than "cutting", which (as is probably clear from the above) I do not. The world has settled on a set of terms to describe these interactions, persisting in using ancient ones just because they're what have always been used just makes Emacs harder to learn that it should be.

(Which may of course be the whole point; surrounding common interactions with unusual terminology is a good way for people who already know Emacs to state to outsiders that they are keepers of arcane knowledge beyond the common ken of man. But social signaling is a shabby motivation for user interface decisions.)

  • Karunamon  10 years ago

    Inertia has a way of preserving value in a way that's easily overlooked. Consider the "save" icon - still commonly represented as a floppy disk even though there's an entire generation in the workforce that grew up without ever touching one.

    It would almost cost more to change it (just in lost productivity) to be "correct" than it would be to just keep the association. I think the same is true for the editors.. changing the terminology would also mean changing a lot of mnemonics. Vim uses D and Y for kill (delete) and yank. C is already bound to another function, and there's an ambiguity there between "C"ut and "C"opy. (P is "P"aste, as you'd expect)

    Just because you're unaware of the reasons for the design is not good enough reason to dismiss the UI design as "social signaling" and tar the whole of the userbase with that kind of accusation. It seems you have an axe to grind against those SmugEmacs(Lisp)Weenies[1] :)

    [1]: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmugLispWeenie

    • minitech  10 years ago

      > changing the terminology would also mean changing a lot of mnemonics. Vim uses D and Y for kill (delete) and yank. C is already bound to another function, and there's an ambiguity there between "C"ut and "C"opy. (P is "P"aste, as you'd expect)

      You corrected the Vim key (D instead of K), but now it doesn’t support the conclusion. Cut, copy, and paste are already typically bound to Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+V, which people seem to use fine without mnemonics. Does anyone actually think “hmm, which key is it to yank text in Vim? Ah, right, y for yank”? (Well, probably, but I imagine they’re the minority.)

      2 replies →

    • Gorgor  10 years ago

      Vim uses y and p to yank (cut) and put (paste), not K and Y. Of course, there are other ways to yank (Y, d, D, …). Ultimately, at least the y goes pack to the ex command y.

      2 replies →

gcr  10 years ago

Modern emacs isn't old or brittle anymore. Heck, we even have text antialiasing now for users with graphical displays! :-)