bombs in bottles
I'm maybe halfway through the Emacs tutorial doc, and two things are pretty obvious to me:
The keyboard shortcuts are giving me "where have you been all my life??" vibes. Just being able to power through documents. Awesome. Beautiful. Neglected in most programs that let you input and mess with text.
It's also reminding me of a boss I once had. We (the office staff) referred to him as "Technoweenie Man." This was a man who needed one of us to double-click his email icon for him. I don't think he ever sent an email, though. He usually called whoever had emailed him and talked to them instead - more than once, reading the email they'd sent to him back to them over the phone.
Part of my job at the time was to digitize old records; the manager and I had to explain to him on FIVE SEPARATE OCCASIONS that I was scanning them, not photocopying them. When this finally sank in, he made us retain the hard copies anyway - putting them right back in the storage room we were supposed to be emptying of them. Then he complained about why we didn't have sufficient storage space.
Yeah.
This man also - and I am not making this up - FREAKED OUT the day he saw me CTRL+A/CTRL+C/CTRL+N/CTRL+V/CTRL+S a Word document. He legitimately thought I'd done some kind of "hacking" and probably broken his computer.
(Dude, you asked me for "this, but a second one so I can make edits but still look at the original." You were also constantly harping on the office staff about "efficiency.")
(Surprise - no, Technoweenie Man did not type with one finger on each hand. He typed with one finger on *one* hand. I guess his left hand was too good for the job?)
I finally got him to calm down enough to explain the concept of keyboard shortcuts to him and even show him that they're in all the Word menu tooltips. But my god. This is why we all liked him best when he was out golfing with a client.
Anyway, I have always loved keyboard shortcuts, plain-text editors, and programs that will do pretty much anything I ask of them if I just learn how to ask. I think I'm going to love Emacs.
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