Re: Great SWT Program

In article <1194928038.753955.219260@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<nebulous99@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

It's only unobvious because you're not trained in the use of
emacs. And at any rate, the summary of the techincal steps of that
command is still more understandable than "move mouse to 223,633 -
right-click and hold - move mouse to 230,742 - release right button".

According to your theories, this last would surely require a spacial
savant to even /contemplate/ doing and, surely, it is mathematically
impossible that most computer users do so through a mouse interface.

[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.

You are not doing yourself any favours when you repress your own
displayed ignorance in this way.

But it is certainly good to learn that you have finally absorbed the
fact that emacs is a graphical application.

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.

It is commonly mapped to Alt, and to Escape.

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.

What dictionary is this I wonder?

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.

Your entrenchment in Windows GUI paradigms is certainly charming, but
it is a mistake to think that this is the be-all end-all of computer
interfaces.

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?

It is not.

[nonsense talk about "the Windows language" snipped]

That's right - repress those ideas! They can only harm your sense of
self-worth!

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

Word is currently displaying "Norwegian" in my status bar but when I
mouse over that text, the tooltip says "Language: English (U.K.)". I
am not sure which one is the lie, but one of the two surely is.

*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.

The fact that you choose not to trust your applications' undo features
does not reflect on emacs in the slightest.

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!

For very unintimate values of "intimately", sure.

And those that
are will no doubt forget from time to time, since no OTHER piece of
software they use is so horribly broken.

If they do, they're not using emacs often enough. I wouldn't recommend
emacs for someone who needs a text editor only once every couple of
weeks.

Or rather, it won't, because
the emacs command they will become very interested in next will be
"uninstall".

Which is certainly their choice to make. Unlike some others in this
debate, I do not consider that "my" GUI paradigm is the only
permissible one.

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

In much the same way, of course, that a Lexus is completely incapable
of transporting people from one place to the other. It must be,
because I never actually tried it.

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.

Unfortunately, this alternative is massively less efficient and so
your cost of not training will dwarf the savings within a few years.

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

Compared to you, anyway.

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.

The next word that starts with "ex".

[various implied insults and other nonsense deleted]

Such as
"It /does/ require such exotic mnemotic talents as "remember what you
started doing two seconds ago" and "manage to keep track of what
you're trying to do for more than two breaths at a time". Presumably
this /could/ be taxing for the ADHD generation I suppose, but then
these are unlikely to become programmers in the first place."

Your strategy of trying to pass off arguments as "insults" just
because you cannot rebut them isn't actually going to convince very
many.

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.

Yes, this is an entry requirement before the secret guild of touch
typers will even consider you for the initiation ritual.

We are /so/ elite I can hardly believe it.

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

It is, however, a completely avoidable one,

Of course. Learning to walk is also an avoidable task, but that
doesn't /necessarily/ make it a good idea.

[amusing analogy snipped]

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.

Of which the first conclusion is erroneous and the second incomplete.
Your case remains in full backpedalling motion.

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.

What rules are those, pray tell?

[implied insults deleted]

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

So you consider that you were entirely successful in using emacs back
in the day?

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.

I find that "most apps" do not.

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.

You're not going to truly master Word either so you better stop using
it.


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?

Your cursor remains in the document, and serves to mark your current
hit. The text you type appears in the mini-buffer at the bottom of the
app so you can tell what it is you're searching for.

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.

You keep trying to force your own learned GUI conventions onto my
descriptions of emacs features. This is at the crux of the
misunderstanding.

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!

It would be if this were at all factual. If you start a new search and
type another C-s without inputting any text, it will repeat the
previous search.

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.

When I write text, I typically don't care about selecting pixels in 2D
space. I care about writing text.

I do not tend to use emacs to make vector drawings.

Detailed doesn't hold a candle to useful though.

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

To you, yes.

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

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

It's just too bad that such an option doesn't currently exist.

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?

If you don't what?

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.

Exactly - in order for your mathematical approach to hold in the real
world, you need to make an incredible number of detailed assumptions
about the situation. It takes an equally incredible amount of luck for
such a complicated set of assumptions to actually hold in any given
sitation.

I never claimed that incremental search was useless. I claimed that it
was no substitute for scrollbars.

Of course it isn't - they do altogether different things. It's your
love for using the scrollbar as a search tool that is puzzling.

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).

And, by the same token, if using Word and breathing air are mutually
exclusive - I'll take the air any day. Luckily for both of us, our
assumptions of mutual exclusivity do not hold.

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!

Actually, this is the tune /you/ have been singing all along, and it
has become clear where it's coming from: you actually /need/ to
memorize your documents so you can use the scrollbar as a "search"
tool. Since you need to do so, you are convinced that everyone else
must also.

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.

You know, if you just listened to yourself more you might actually
learn something.

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>"

That this seems complex to you doesn't mean that it /is/ complex, of
course. I can only conclude that your tools do not provide
auto-completion functionality and for this I pity you.

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,

Wrong.

no
selections (that behave at all properly anyway)

Wrong.

, no cut/copy/paste
(ditto)

Wrong.

, a complete pain to edit text with,

Wrong.

Considering your standards - zero out of four is pretty bad, isn't it?

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.

Or perhaps I actually like to have large windows. Apparantly, this is
another feature that is not supported by your super-duper GUI-magic.

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.

You actually have your genitals in the face?

.. . . humour option overload . . . core dumped.

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.

This "lot of" extra state handling is your fabrication, of course.

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.

Do you consider that the majority of the population is as infallible
as you are?

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.

Which one was that?

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.

If by "going" somewhere, you mean "moving away from the topic at hand,
i.e. emacs" then I submit that the discussion isn't /supposed/ to be
"going" anywhere - it's supposed to stay right here!

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

Windows UI convention, certainly. There are other conventions.

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

These are only problems to you because the first paradigm you learned
was a different one.

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

Denying reality is also not going to convince anyone. Emacs
demonstrably does have a menu bar and it also demonstrably does have a
File menu. Why you would go to such lengths to absolutely /prove/ your
non-infallibility to a general audience is beyond me.

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).

Of course, emacs demonstrably has all of this also so you're digging
yourself a really big hole here.

For the benefit of future researchers: It is November 2007, check out
the repositories from this time period at ftp.gnu.org for verification
of claims.

[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.)

You are projecting again.

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?

It is your comprehension that is imperfect. Despite your using
mode-full software all day, you fail to understand that other software
may have modes also.

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.

Luckily, I need neither. I can just search regardless of document
order or of exact phrases used. So long as I hit a word that /is/
used, I'm there.

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.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how incremental search is
actually used.

I do not condemn the idea of a GUI app.

OK. I claim victory. End of thread.

Talk about moving the goal posts. Anyway, I never did say GUI apps are
condemndable and I have repeatedly pointed out that since emacs /is/
one this would hardly be very opportune anyway.

Cheers,
Bent D
--
Bent Dalager - bcd@xxxxxxx - http://www.pvv.org/~bcd
powered by emacs
.