Re: Great SWT Program

On Nov 19, 6:10 am, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
That script still won't be able to launch the vi instances in separate
terminals though. They'd all open in whichever terminal the script
itself was run in, whether that was one of the branches of a screen
session or not.

Why would you want them to appear in some other terminal window? Do
you enjoy confusing yourself on a daily basis?

What are you babbling about? Of course you'd want them to appear in
separate windows, so that you could switch among them easily and
conveniently or even place two of them side by side.

There is no "natural" way to flip between documents in a computer
program. There are only learned ways. And, of course, once learned, vi
is hardly inconvenient.

Having to do the same thing differently in every circumstance is
certainly inconvenient. Whereas over here I can switch between several
open Word documents; between several open Notepads; between several
open image files; between several open email or news sessions; and
even among these things all with alt-tab.

You, on the other hand, need to do one thing with text files, another
with other things, another with yet other things, and can't have
editing sessions for more than one *type* of thing going concurrently
and switch among them easily except by using xterms or screen or
something and having a *second layer* of switching to do, where you
need one command to switch from app to app and then another, app-
idiosyncratic one to switch from document to document after reaching
the right app. It's a whole lot of complication and pain and, as the
very existence of Windows demonstrates, a fundamentally unnecessary
one.

How primitive. Much more work than alt-tab, especially when you
consider the need to also switch into and back out of command mode.

Alt-tab doesn't take you to the next file - it takes you to the
previous application.

It's the same thing if you've got separate top level windows open for
each file; I've explained this previously. In fact, you hold alt and
hit tab one or more times to go from the current window backwards
along a history of the windows ordered by last active. So if you're
working with two documents alt-tab will flip between them. With three,
alt-tab-tab will switch to the least recently focused of the three and
alt-tab to the middle one. Or you can visually navigate, because icons
and titles appear in a dialog-like thing when you hold alt, hit tab
once, and then enough time goes by with alt still held down (a
fraction of a second). So if you don't remember where a window is in
terms of how many you've focused more recently, you can still find it,
but switching among a small number of documents is especially simple
at the same time.

Versus anything that just cycles through them in fixed order. When
working with two documents but parking several other open documents
for later access, half of the time you'll hit the tab-equivalent once
and the other half of the time N-1 times with N the total number open.
Ouch. (You could close the other open documents, but if you know
you'll need them again, and the software is primitive enough not to
provide a file open MRU list ... ouch again.)

To get :n functionality with alt-tab (assuming
this is even how your current app supports that kind of
functionality), you would have to alt-tab-tab-tab until you get to
that next file.

You presuppose you want to access them in a fixed order, where the
most common situation is to switch among a small number of closely-
related files and later to switch to something less recent when your
focus shifts. This also ignores the existence of many other methods of
switching in Windows, most involving clicking a window, clicking a
tab, or clicking a taskbar button. You can force a window to the back
of the list by minimizing it, or get it out of the list entirely by
closing it, if you're done with it. If you want to do one thing with
each one and then you're done with it for the foreseeable future, mass-
opening them and then just doing something and hitting alt-F4 will
bring up the next one immediately without ANY alt-tabbing, because
when they were newly opened they all got at the head of the list from
being briefly focused in turn as they opened.

I'm betting that there is none or else the only ones involve a lot of
typing and even debugging of some sort. Trying to do any sort of
complex mass file manipulation from a command line has always put me
in mind of fumbling around and bumping into furniture in the dark.

Well, that's how it feels for those who are blind I suppose.

Why do you think I keep describing your preferred interfaces with
phrases like "...but you have to do it blind, while I can actually see
what the heck I'm doing when I do this task"?

Your grossly underestimate humanity.

Or you grossly overestimate it.

accept a list of files as a parameter,

If it didn't, you would use it.

?

third this will all happen
frighteningly blind, so if the list is obviously incorrect the first
thing you see is "deleting UselessFile1 ... deleting UselessFile2 ...
deleting UselessFile3 ... deleting ImportantFileIWantToKeep.txt ...
^C" Too late for ImportantFileIWantToKeep.txt of course, but at least
you stopped it before it deleted anything else it shouldn't have, hmm?

If this worries you, you do a dry-run before doing the actual command.

MORE time consuming stuff and MORE deleting. Windows lets you do the
"dry run" and see the list results, then either continue to delete the
files or not, or even cherry-pick a subset to delete. Perhaps you can
narrow down the set of files with a search, but some of the criteria
are AI-complete, so you need to narrow it down further manually. In
that case you do the search, select the results, and winnow some of
them from the selection, or leave the results unselected and add a few
one by one, depending on which predominate in the results, ones you
want to keep or ones you want to nuke. Then you hit delete. Simple,
no?

"alias emacs em" is also not a very good idea. I'll leave the "why" as
an exercise for the reader.

Because it makes it even more likely for some newbie to stumble into
emacs and spend the rest of his life spending $400 a month on therapy
and cursing you and God? :P
.