Re: Is Quanta for me?

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Re: Is Quanta for me?
by PaulSeamons on Wednesday 10/Mar/2004, @10:35

Emacs doesn't quite nail that list down - but it gets the main ones.

> the ability to use Cervisia (CVS) from your editor

Emacs has built in vc (version control) mode which works very well with CVS (and I would be suprised if it worked with subversion). The key bindings are very easy to use once they are known (discovering them is always the fun/hard part in emacs). I do like Cervisia when I am working on the cvs tree in multiple directories - but I can also do this in vc-dired mode (version control directory edit).

> PHP support.

Emacs and vim would give you plenty of syntax highlighting, and if ctags supports it, you would get the autocompletion as well. Haven't seen about the structure overview though - sounds very nice.

> KIOSlaves

Hmmmm - this one is harder to match. KIOSlaves are very cool. Emacs does have built in ftp mode (edit files, manage directories on remote servers). Samba in the past has been done on a fileside mount point. SCP - I haven't seen that built into emacs yet. Well - I guess this is a mute point all now because of the FuseIO framework which lets commandline programs access

> Everything else

Yeah - Emacs doesn't have much template support, or a table editor, or a project manager or a css editor. So these could make life nice. And Emacs definately won't do WYSIWYG.

Seems to be that it depends upon your needs. There are definite advantages to Quanta. But it may take awhile (if ever) for some old commandline people to make the switch. I still know plenty of people who use WordPerfect 5.1 and are faster at it and more productive (in writting simple documents and books at least) than anybody else that I've met using another word processor.

Of course - the commandline people equal about 1% of the enduser population (sorry for the obvious unsubstantiated statistic).

Paul

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Re: Is Quanta for me?
by PaulSeamons on Wednesday 10/Mar/2004, @10:52

Of course - if you read at all about the huge, lengthy list of the amazing things that Quanta can do - then the reasons to switch from emacs to Quanta really start to make the decision easy.

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Re: Is Quanta for me?
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 10/Mar/2004, @15:01

> Seems to be that it depends upon your needs. There are definite advantages to Quanta. But it may take awhile (if ever) for some old commandline people to make the switch.

Wow, CLI? Guess what? There is an old saying, "The pen is mightier than the sword" but an old samauri saying paraphrased "pen and sword in accord". In the windows world GUI is king and every operation is a click away. As you no doubt know this is a recipe to drive you insane many times where repetitive tasks demand the "sword" of the CLI to cut quickly through those operations. This doesn't mean that the GUI is in any way bad. It means that GUI and CLI both have strengths and weaknesses. The ideal application "thinks" and acts like a hybrid, getting out of the way and offering up the CLI for the tasks that it makes sense for and pulling the strengths of the GUI where it makes sense. The key is exposing strengths and augmenting weaknesses accordingly.

Quanta offers the user programmable user actions that can execute scripts using any language that runs in the shell. These can operate on selected text, editor content or no input and can output to replace the editor content, selected text or place it at the cursor position... even no output or make a new file. Add to this the fact that we're making sure everything inside is exposed via DCOP and you can script using your current file or project directory... we even have Kommander to build dialogs that add scripting. You could quite literraly open Quanta on one desktop, go to another and begin composing documents and performing various tasks in Quanta from konsole. ;-)

Quanta is not at all about being a superior application because the GUI is king. It is about being a GUI application that is superior because it pays much more than a passing homage to CLI and offers the developer an easy integration of the best of these two technologies.

Why would anyone seriously choose to not be able to choose between them where their strengths serve their needs? ;-)

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