I could not successfully search for green-bar; I was turning up a brand of rebar made from fiberglass and various vegan bars and restaurants in different cities... but nothing related to coding or text editing. Do you have a link handy that would explain what the green-bar you're referring to is? Or, failing that, could I ask you for a brief (one or two sentences) explanation/summary? Would be appreciated. (UPDATE: Figured it out, see P.S. below)
BTW, if you've been reading my responses you'll see that I've landed in the same "get rid of tab characters" camp, because while they're nice in theory, they cause pain in practice.
EDIT to add this P.S.: Figured it out. I eventually came across https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/greenbar.html which mentioned the alternating white and green bands of color on old printer paper. I remember those, but I never heard them called "green-bar" which is why I couldn't place the term.
Sorry, didn't mean to send anybody on a wild goose chase. Glad you found a reference, and also somewhat glad that the reference says that the the term was "often" used -- maybe I'm not quite ready for the dementia ward yet?
BTW, if you've been reading my responses you'll see that I've landed in the same "get rid of tab characters" camp, because while they're nice in theory, they cause pain in practice.
I had to go back and look. You obviously have more patience than I do for this sort of debate. :-)
I don't think people who fall down on the tab side of the debate have thought things through. Tabs are about alignment, of course, but why did we transport the typewriter alignment to printers? (Many printers had escape sequences that let you set the tab spacing.) Arguably, it was to save computation time, storage space, data transmission time, and even (for faster printers) to make your print job come out faster. People forget how precious all those were.
Today, a tab key on a keyboard is a perfectly cromulent method to get to your next alignment boundary, but there's a reason that every single usable code editor lets you program the tab key to emit a certain number of spaces.
I'm sure it was often used, but I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the non-English-speaking country where my father worked for many years. So "green-bar paper" is not the only apparently-commonly-used English term that I had to learn later in life, since when I was growing up, I heard English mostly from my parents and coworkers, and that's not a term that they happened to use a lot. So although it's my native tongue, I'm constantly finding holes in my vocabulary — usually 80's or 90's slang terms that my (extensive) reading habit couldn't teach me because most of the English-language books I had access to in the 80's or 90's were published in the 1970's or earlier.
In other words, don't take my not knowing a term as evidence that it wasn't commonly used; my childhood was unusual by the standards of most Americans. :-)
Comments
I could not successfully search for green-bar; I was turning up a brand of rebar made from fiberglass and various vegan bars and restaurants in different cities... but nothing related to coding or text editing. Do you have a link handy that would explain what the green-bar you're referring to is? Or, failing that, could I ask you for a brief (one or two sentences) explanation/summary? Would be appreciated. (UPDATE: Figured it out, see P.S. below)
BTW, if you've been reading my responses you'll see that I've landed in the same "get rid of tab characters" camp, because while they're nice in theory, they cause pain in practice.
EDIT to add this P.S.: Figured it out. I eventually came across https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/greenbar.html which mentioned the alternating white and green bands of color on old printer paper. I remember those, but I never heard them called "green-bar" which is why I couldn't place the term.
Sorry, didn't mean to send anybody on a wild goose chase. Glad you found a reference, and also somewhat glad that the reference says that the the term was "often" used -- maybe I'm not quite ready for the dementia ward yet?
I had to go back and look. You obviously have more patience than I do for this sort of debate. :-)
I don't think people who fall down on the tab side of the debate have thought things through. Tabs are about alignment, of course, but why did we transport the typewriter alignment to printers? (Many printers had escape sequences that let you set the tab spacing.) Arguably, it was to save computation time, storage space, data transmission time, and even (for faster printers) to make your print job come out faster. People forget how precious all those were.
Today, a tab key on a keyboard is a perfectly cromulent method to get to your next alignment boundary, but there's a reason that every single usable code editor lets you program the tab key to emit a certain number of spaces.
I'm sure it was often used, but I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the non-English-speaking country where my father worked for many years. So "green-bar paper" is not the only apparently-commonly-used English term that I had to learn later in life, since when I was growing up, I heard English mostly from my parents and coworkers, and that's not a term that they happened to use a lot. So although it's my native tongue, I'm constantly finding holes in my vocabulary — usually 80's or 90's slang terms that my (extensive) reading habit couldn't teach me because most of the English-language books I had access to in the 80's or 90's were published in the 1970's or earlier.
In other words, don't take my not knowing a term as evidence that it wasn't commonly used; my childhood was unusual by the standards of most Americans. :-)