Re: Great SWT Program

On Nov 10, 9:29 pm, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
It's certainly easy to /do/, which is rather the point. It's
interpreted by a computer and not by a human, so it being hard to
interpret is irrelevant.

Bollocks. The human operator has to think up that long and unobvious
string of text to type it in in the first place.

[implied insult deleted]
[various irrelevancies snipped mercilessly]
[implied insults deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

M-x -> I'm not sure; alt x? Not that it matters.

Meta-x

Which is? Most of us don't have a key cap labeled "meta" on our
keyboards.

You're not making sense. Highlighted means "this is the selection",

It does not. All it means is "this is highlighed because I want to
draw your attention to it".

It means "this is the selection" as its dictionary definition. Someone
can use it to mean something else, in much the way someone could
choose to consistently use "blue" to refer to the color red, but the
result will be pain and confusion and nothing but trouble.

Not /the/ language, but /a/ language. And it's not the emacs language.

Yes, /the/ language. What "emacs language"? The localization being
discussed is the English-language localization, is it not?

[nonsense talk about "the Windows language" snipped]

There is no such thing. It has many language localizations. None of
which, to my knowledge, actively lie to the user.

It's NOT "just decoration", it is a key piece of communication between
the software and the user.

It's unnecessary clutter. I /know/ what I started doing two seconds
ago - there is not need to scream it out at me.

*You* may be perfectly comfortable doing everything with the lights
out but many people like having feedback and the ability to double-
check especially when doing something complicated that would be messy
to undo/retry or drastic (e.g. large deletions). Presuming that
twilight out to be good enough working illumination for everybody is
rude arrogance.

It's not going to mislead an educated user.

It's going to mislead even people with Ph. D.s that are not intimately
familiar with the specific software, for Chrissakes! And those that
are will no doubt forget from time to time, since no OTHER piece of
software they use is so horribly broken. Or rather, it won't, because
the emacs command they will become very interested in next will be
"uninstall".

It is not the "wrong" thing. It /would/ be wrong in a typical Windows
app, but that's not what emacs is.

That much is certain. What it is is unusable. What little feedback the
UI does provide is completely unreliable. :P

Training is a one-off cost that will pay off hundredfold throughout a
career.

Not if that training can be bypassed by using an easier to learn,
easier to use, equally powerful alternative it won't.

You still do not understand [snip]

No, and I probably never will, because this software was obviously
designed for wackos that think in a fundamentally strange way compared
to normal human beings. :P

Complete WHAT word? There are a ton of dictionary words that start
with "ex", including, for example, "examine" as well as "extend". It
can't know which one of those you want to search for, nevermind if you
don't want any word that it has in its dictionary at all...

The next one, of course.

The next WHAT? Word? Where? Are you claiming it can read the user's
mind? Because that makes no sense and I flatly disbelieve it.

[various implied insults and other nonsense deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

using the mouse
to type on an on-screen keyboard would probably be about as good for
you as your actual typing style is.

No, I expect it would be slow and awkward. And I don't care for your
rude and insulting and arrogant claims of superiority in your "typing
style" and other respects. You may have an unusual memory capability;
unfortunately you've obviously let it swell your head. Now all we can
do is pray that it swells a little more and goes "pop!" thus sparing
us the agony of further condescending and insulting news posts like
the one I'm replying to here. :P

It is something to overcome, certainly. But it is far from an
insurmountable task.

It is, however, a completely avoidable one, like using a manual loom
in an age when all the textiles the world needs can be produced with
more advanced technology and considerably less human labor and, yes,
less human training too. It's a waste of time and money, in short.

If there are very many, you typically either refine your search or
else adapt a different strategy.

Of which the first option requires memorization of the document and
the second means to use scrolling. I rest my case.

Your failure to understand the backspace function doesn't make that
function any less useful.

Oh, I understand it just fine. Enough to know how broken such behavior
is, as it breaks fundamental rules of user-interface behavior far
deeper than such superficialities as, say, CUA keybindings vs. wacky
ones.


Why not page up and save yourself some trouble? (Under the hypothesis
that occurrences of "mon" are too numerous to sift through the false
positives in a reasonable amount of time.)

Then you do M-v

?

[implied insults deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

MDI was discontinued by Microsoft a number of years back and Ctrl-Tab
has been an unreliable manner of switching between different documents
since.

But sometimes it works (e.g. in Firefox to switch tabs); if it works
in a given application it works consistently. And most apps just use
multiple top-level windows, which submit to alt-tab switching.

unfamiliar with the extremely complicated pattern of usage of emacs
(your latest examples read like stereo instructions!) will get nothing
at all accomplished.

They will be trained in its use of course.

What a waste (see above).

[nonsense deleted]

And, of course, C-x r k, C-x r t, C-x r y, etc.

*rolls eyes* Of course.

Depending on what you mean by "master", of course. Truly mastering
emacs is probably a futile endeavour.

All the more reason to avoid it. That sort of trait is fine and dandy
in a game like chess, but not in a productivity tool.

[more nonsense snipped]

The search query appears in the mini-buffer, but the cursor remains
with the search hits.

Then how the hell are you supposed to edit the search query?!

I described this earlier, but [insult deleted]

You said you type a search query at a prompt. But now you're saying
that the insertion point will be in the document, which would make new
typing insert into the document. Which is it? Or is there some
(arcane) way to switch the input focus between the two locations?

Now you're telling me that the insertion point will be in the
document, which just means you can edit the document before hitting
next match.

You cannot. You must terminate the search in order to start editing
the document.

But you just said that the insertion point is in the document? You're
contradicting yourself again.

If what you're saying *now* is true, this search is actually worse in
some respects than bog-standard Windoze ones (besides the awkward
interface, which training might help with). What if you want to make
some change near many or all occurrences of some particular term? This
is easy to do with a typical Windows tool. With your emacs as you've
described it you'll have to launch a new search and type the query
over and over again for each instance you need to do an edit near.
What a pain in the ass!

Your keyboard typically has in the order of 100 different input
options.

None of which can quickly make precise selections in two-dimensional
space, unlike a 2D analog input device of some kind, whether mouse,
joystick, thumb stick (like Thinkpad laptops have), trackball,
trackpad, or touchscreen.

and a thin drool of visual feedback can't possibly be
superior to rich and detailed visual feedback.

Detailed doesn't hold a candle to useful though.

Your idea of "useful" is both missing useful information and
gratuitously cryptic and unintelligible.

I will go with ugly and efficient over pretty and inefficient any day.

And I will go with pretty and efficient. So there!

So much for selecting using search to find the second endpoint, then,
if doing so will disturb the position of the first endpoint.

You will start the search while on the first endpoint so this isn't an
issue.

And if you don't, for whatever reason?

[implied insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

In the real world, of course, this can easily happen.

Bull*** -- not if we make some basic assumptions, such as that you do
these things immediately after one another and the basket doesn't have
large holes in the bottom.

[insults and assorted other BS deleted]
[false accusation deleted]

I never claimed that incremental search was useless. I claimed that it
was no substitute for scrollbars. Furthermore, if incremental search
and convenient editing near each of many matches are mutually
exclusive I'll take "normal" search anyday except in read-only
environments (such as Firefox displaying a web page).

[false accusations of lawbreaking deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

I prefer to use a tool that does /not/ require me to memorize the
documents that I work on.

That's not the tune you were singing a couple of days ago!

Your explanation was strangely empty in the face of me having
successfully done this exact thing for fifteen years.

You've done nothing of the kind. Just because you post something to
usenet doesn't mean it's true.

[nonsense deleted]

We're talking a complex query, plus a bunch of weird extra chords, not
simply typing "ant" into a box or something.

Where is the complexity?

I'll quote some complexity back to you: "M-x local-s<space><space> e
insert-k<space><space><enter>"

This is the sort of stuff you keep posting and behaving as though it
were devoid of complexity. So I hope you don't mind if I take any
claim of simplicity coming from you regarding emacs with an entire
salt mine, nevermind just a grain.

I also used to live in blissful ignorance back when I was programming
on the Commodore 64. I had the fortune to revisit it a couple of years
ago, and ran straight into the brick wall of realising that the C64's
default editor had no history, no scrollback, no selections, no
cut/copy/paste, no insert/overwrite mode (as such) and was altogether
a complete pain to edit text with.

See? That's what happens when you use primitive editors from
yesteryear, instead of a modern GUI one.

This is the typical user experience of emacs: no scrollback, no
selections (that behave at all properly anyway), no cut/copy/paste
(ditto), a complete pain to edit text with, etc.; exceeded only by vi,
where simply starting it up and attempting to type something makes it
go bonkers (now THERE is a way for a text editor UI designer to get an
A for originality, albeit along with an F for everything else).

What, you mean M-x doctor ?

*rolls eyes*

The scroll bar is more difficult because it covers a lot more space on
the screen that you will need to move your eyes across before you can
accurately assess how far down the knob is. The percentage holds that
information directly for you to read.

Then you're sitting too damn close to the screen. Close enough that
you probably have gotten a big enough dose in all the years of sitting
in front of CRTs never to be able to have children. Fortunately.

Deselection is entirely unnecessary. Adding the need to actually
deselect something is just overly burdening the user with
administrating state handling he doesn't need.

It's your editor that burdens the user with state handling he doesn't
need. Better control over selections is a minor price to pay for
cutting a lot of extra state handling burden elsewhere.

It hasn't really come up. If it ever does, I'll think about it at that
point.

Well it comes up occasionally in my use of computers. Your tool choice
may suit you, but it is clearly unsuitable for me, purely on
functionality (and lack thereof) grounds. Likewise it is unsuitable
for the majority of the population.

if you paste into an emacs search prompt, it immediately does the
search and won't let you paste something in and edit it and *then*
search?

No.

Then an enter keypress is necessary to submit the search after all.

No.

Then you evidently use something other than enter to submit the
search, and I claim victory on another point you were trying to refute
earlier.

I'm running out of joyous celebrations here . . .

Good.

WE'RE NOT TALKING LOCALIZATION, FUCKWAD, WE'RE TALKING TWO SUPPOSEDLY
ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LOCALIZATIONS ONE OF WHICH HAPPENS TO LIE TO THE
USER.

That may be what you're talking about. I, on the other hand, am
discussing emacs.

Then this discussion is going nowhere and may as well end immediately.

Heh, no, of course not, because if you accepted it you would have to
accept that it blows your argument completely out of the water.

It does nothing of the sort, because it's completely bogus. It's a
matter of convention, AND of international localization. Emacs'
behavior that is wrong here involves the fundamental meanings of
things, more akin to misusing the steering wheel as aiming the mirrors
and using something else to actually steer the fucking car. And it's
observed in the English localization of emacs.

You seem to be projecting again. You need to understand that the MMI
paradigms you have been taught are only /one set/ of many possible
sets of MMI paradigms. Just because these are the ones you have been
taught does not mean that all others are inherently wrong.

You misunderstand the issue. We're not talking about keybindings that
are different from the Windows norm (or a steering wheel on the
"wrong" side of the car). We're talking about fundamental problems
with the UI behavior (more akin to the car having a steering wheel
like object on the dashboard that does not actually steer the car, and
something that fails to resemble a steering wheel at all taking on
that role instead -- something awkward to handle while also keeping
your eyes on the road, at that).

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

"Quite good" just doesn't cut it anymore when you've seen "excellent".

I've never seen "excellent", and you're thoroughly failing to convince
me that emacs remotely resembles "excellent". In fact both my
experiences and every word you've written on the subject put it firmly
on the *other* side of "quite good" on the spectrum.

How awkward. You'll propably strain something, too.

This must be why touch typing is such a niche skill.

No, wait, it isn't . . .

It is; it might not have been back when huge amounts of manual data
entry got done because the scanner and OCR software had yet to be
invented, but it is now.

So let me try to explain again: if using File->Open File... is
impossibly difficult in emacs, then it would be equally impossible in
Notepad.

Not really. Notepad has this thing called a "graphical user interface"
that makes it easy. Using File->Open is clearly trivial in Notepad and
nontrivial in an application that has no little row of "File Edit ..."
at the top of the window and no little arrow you can use to select
that word "File" with either. :P

Yet you praise Notepad for being so easy to use because it
has friendly helpful menus.

And it doesn't lie, and backspace works, and selecting stuff works,
and *de*selecting stuff works, and you can pause a search to edit
stuff and then resume the search without retyping the query, and you
can easily paste into it and copy out of it from/to other open
applications' windows, and ...

(I'd mention easy multitasking by being able to shrink, enlarge,
cover, and uncover Notepad's window, but with a terminal emulator you
can do at least some of that with vi and emacs too).

[paranoid ravings deleted]

See a doctor. (One that *isn't* preceded by "M-x" or anything similar!
You need one licensed to prescribe meds. Badly. Urgently.)

And C-w, C-y, M-y, undo(!), and backspace(!!) don't. And none of them
are consistent with *other apps*. Any other apps. At all.

I find that the work the same every time I use them.

That's not the behavior that you described. Were you incorrect in
those descriptions, or are you incorrect here instead?

I work on documents every day without exact memorization.

And yet, further up, you admitted to the opposite since you /have/ to
memorize them in order to use your preferred
jump-to-where-I-know-it-is type of navigation.

No, you don't. You only need to know the order of the parts of the
document, rather than the whole thing word-for-word backwards and
forwards as your search-to-navigate requires.

YOU are the
one who implicitly claims to memorize whole documents exactly, by
claiming to primarily navigate using methods that are not very
efficient unless you have.

Ah, no, I am the one who you claim has to memorize documents in order
to work on them. I never made such a claim.

You implicitly claimed to do so yourself when you claimed to primarily
use search for long range navigation, unless you only ever do so with
highly structured stuff such as source code rather than plain old
English prose.

[insult deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

I do not condemn the idea of a GUI app.

OK. I claim victory. End of thread.

[some BS deleted]
[the end]

.