emacs question: suppressing backslashes

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Gordon Marx remarked:
| On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 11:42:05 -0400 (EDT), David Kramer
| > Might help a little.  It doesn't look like there's a way to do exactly
| > what you want.
|
| Yeah there is. Switch to vi. ::ducks::
|
| Gordon
| always up for a good vi vs. emacs flamewar :--)

Heh.  I've always liked an argument I've seen in favor of flame wars.
This  is  that,  all  too  often,  when  you  ask  how to get X to do
something, you get replies that reduce to "RTFM, 1D10T!" But  if  you
can  say  "Hey,  Y  can do this but apparently X can't," then usually
some expert in X will prove you wrong by explaining how to do it.

I mostly use vi, and this is how I've learned most  of  what  I  know
about it. Let's face it, existing documentation isn't all that great,
and 25 years ago it was a lot sketchier. So I watched for vi-vs-emacs
flame wars, where people who more about vi than I did would prove the
emacs partisans wrong by showing how you'd do something with vi.  And
I saw this strategy used by more than one emacs user to good effect.

In this case, saying that vi can do something  that  emacs  can't  is
likely  to  eventually get an example of how to do it with emacs.  In
this case, what's requested is something I do with vi all  the  time.
It does behave differently on different systems, depending on whether
xterm (or whatever terminal emulator) handles long lines by inserting
a newline or by just drawing the text on the next line. But you never
get any silly backslashes.  I'd bet that this has been faced by emacs
users  in the past, and there's a solution.  So we just need to flame
them a bit to get them to prove that emacs is once again a match  for
vi.

(As near as I can tell, they are about equally capable editors.   But
trying  to  master  both  would  be a lot of extra work that might be
better spent using one of them to build software.)

(And there are all the jokes about how emacs isn't an editor, it's an
operating system. ;-)