Re: Great SWT Program

In article <1194906409.585509.89620@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<nebulous99@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 10, 1:05 pm, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[ snip ]

For real analysis of any news thing I rely more on the internet and
particularly on certain reputable blogs, Wikipedia with its avowed
goal of neutrality, and the like.

Avowed goals are not always achieved. Wikipedia is useful and often
correct, but I take everything there with at least a small grain of
salt. You don't?

Bull***. This whole thread amounts to you and Bent saying "the GUI
paradigm sucks" while trying to defend the "doing everything in the
dark with a flashlight between the teeth" paradigm, which genuinely
DOES suck.

Uh-huh. So, when I say "GUIs have some advantages, but as currently
implemented usually seem to have some limitations I find annoying",
that amounts to my saying "the GUI paradigm sucks"? If I meant the
latter, I'd write it. But I didn't.

Why this isn't happening -- I can only
surmise that there's no demand for the features we find useful.

And there you have it. Your needs are clearly enormously atypical, and
therefore any suggestion that your tools are superior in any general
sense (rather than merely for you and the few other people with the
same atypicalities) is clearly bogus.

Why was there no World Wide Web in 1990, and no demand for one (that
I can remember anyway)? Could it be that it didn't occur to most
people that such a thing was possible?

[ snip ]

And that probably works fine if the remote files aren't too big,
and your network connection is fast enough -- I mean, if you're
going to open one of those remote files, isn't that going to
involve shipping all of its bits temporarily to the local system?
at least to its memory?

How common, though, is it to need to work remotely with large files
over a dial-up speed connection these days?

Fairly common for me, if "dial-up speed connection" is broadened
a bit to include what typical home-user ISPs provide. (Well, I'm
guessing my experience is fairly typical, though I could be wrong.
I currently connect via cable modem, and it's a lot faster than
the dial-up access I used to have, but nowhere near as fast as
what I have at work.)

In Unixworld we call them "NFS mounts" (if I understand properly
what a Windows "network share" is). How common is it for Windows
shops to allow remote access (i.e., off-site) access to these
shares?

Who said anything about *off-site* access? But it's fairly common, and
fairly secure, via password-protected VPN tunnel or similar.

I thought that's what we were talking about -- remote access. Why
wouldn't that include off-site access?

[ snip ]

Yes, as I say a few sentences later, most other
text-mode applications I know of make some use of either the
vi keybindings or the emacs keybindings. Some (e.g., the bash
command shell) allow you to choose either one.

That doesn't make sense. Those are text editor bindings. Apps that
aren't text editors won't generally have any major functions in common
save navigation, which really should just be by arrow keys anyway, and
maybe some form of primitive cut/copy/paste.

Use case: Retrieving a previously-entered command and editing it.

[ snip ]

As someone pointed out a few rounds ago, nothing about how we
communicate with computers is natural. Maybe if you've only
spent significant time with one platform, and you started with
it at an early age, "control-Z to undo" is as natural as breathing.

That doesn't get emacs off the hook for lying to the user about what
will be deleted and it doesn't get vi off the hook for its wacky use
of modes. :P

Sure it does. emacs is not lying, only telling you something in
its language/conventions rather than those of the currently dominant
UI paradigm. And vi's modes seem normal when one is used to them,
presumably just as control-Z to undo seems normal to you.

Just like for me "j to move the cursor down a line" .... :-)?

Oh, j is down? Really, how is anyone expected to form and remember the
correct associations between hjkl and various directions when there's
no obvious connection between them,

In the same way one learns that control-Z means undo.

either geometrically as laid out
on the keyboard or in some sort of letter association? It's
(deliberately) obtuse and difficult to learn when the arrow keys are
right there on the same keyboard, gratuitously eschewed by the
software designer.


Curiously enough, vim in insert mode responds to the Del key by
deleting the key under the cursor. I don't use that feature,
because for me learning the older methods long since became a sunk
cost. But it's available.

You prefer to actually count and then type the number in and "x"

No. Of course not. But that's not what I do.

rather than just hold down del until most of what you want to nuke is
gone and then tap it a few times to get rid of the rest? It's a lot
more complicated. Most of the time when I use del it's either to
delete a character (one hit), a word or a few words (hold down for a
bit, then tap), or to the end of the line (shift-end, del). It takes
me a fraction of a second to 1 second in each case, and doesn't
require me to count a possibly-large (30 or 40 sometimes) number of
characters and then type in the resulting number before hitting my
delete key, and then undo if I miscounted and start all over again.
You hate to move your hands a whole lot for some reason; surely you'd
appreciate hitting only del in place of reaching for the number keys
to type several digits first? Or doesn't your OS preference let you
set a reasonably short key repeat delay and a reasonably high repeat
speed so that the hold-down-del method works quickly enough? The only
saving grace for the whole count-em-first way of doing things is that
your software obliges you to view the text in a fixed-width font,
which makes counting characters a little easier than with a
proportional font. On the other hand, proportional fonts have their
own advantages, too, and my tools don't require me to count characters
like that, so I don't incur the disadvantage...

I'll leave this whole rant in, because it's such a great example of
theorizing about something you don't use and don't know much about
and are apparently determined to think the worst of. What you say
about vim bears little resemblance to my actual use of the tool.

Not that you care, but:

Among the commands I use most often for deleting text in vim are
"dd" (delete line), "dw" (delete word), "x" (delete a single
character), and using visual mode to select a region of text and
delete it.

The hold-down-delete-key method seems fiddly and tedious to me --
have to really pay attention not to overshoot, and while of course
one can undo, um, weren't you saying a while back that computer
users learn not to rely on undo?

Mileage varies, maybe.

I'm all in favor of what I understand to be the original idea of
HTML -- logical markup, with details of presentation dependent
on user's settings. I'm just not entirely convinced it makes
sense for code.

Why? As long as the semantics (what the compiler cares about) would be
preserved...

Yeah, maybe. I'm not sure most people write comments in a way
that meshes well with this idea. But -- whatever.

--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
.