Re: What programs do you make sure are installed on a new Linux

On 2024-11-21, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 21 Nov 2024 04:31:13 GMT, Robert Riches wrote:
>

Regarding moving around requiring n+1 keystrokes, GNU Emacs lets you
experience the power of Control-U.  It is a prefix argument that
(oversimplification follows, but ...) multiplies the effect of the next
action by 4.

>
I hope it has a similar prefix to undo all the stuff I just destroyed with
Ctrl-U.

In Emacs, 'undo' is Meta-U.  The Ctrl-U prefix doesn't seem to
work with that.  So, for anything that's going to change the
document, it's advisable to just _be_ _careful_.  For example,
when executing a keyboard macro (to transpose columns in a table,
for example), execute it once then again, then 4 at a time for a
bit, then 16 at a time; then if that all looks safe do a whole
bunch.

For an additional measure of safety, there are numbered backup
versions.  After a few sessions editing a small file named "z", I
have this:

hostname:~/scratch% ls -alt
total 28
drwxr-xr-x  2 me users 4096 Nov 21 19:50 .
-rw-r--r--  1 me users   19 Nov 21 19:50 z
-rw-r--r--  1 me users   14 Nov 21 19:50 z.~4~
-rw-r--r--  1 me users   12 Nov 21 19:50 z.~3~
-rw-r--r--  1 me users    9 Nov 21 19:50 z.~2~
-rw-r--r--  1 me users    3 Nov 21 19:50 z.~1~
drwxr-xr-x 51 me users 4096 Nov 21 19:46 ..
hostname:~/scratch%

If I mess up a macro, I just go back to the previous edition.

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)