Re: Great SWT Program

In article <8ba7efd1-9cf1-4a53-80cb-94de71011fbc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<twerpinator@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

If you want them in separate windows (rather than in separate terminal
windows), then you run them as X clients.

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.

Except when you need to use ctrl-tab, of course.

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.

The first one or two times one does it, it is not painful but rather
an interesting learning experience. The third and later times it is
also not painful, it just /is/.

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.

Which means that if you want the "next" file, you actually have to go
/searching/ for it. In the mean time, :n just takes you there.

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,

This would be the entire reason for using :n - if you wanted to select
a file by some other method, you would use some other method.

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"?

Mostly because you have built yourself a world view, based upon your
own prejudices, that just happens to be comically inaccurate.

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.

If you're doing something destructive, you probably want to take some
time to review before initiating the process. This is true whether you
are using a GUI or a CLI to do it.

"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

No, no, the jackpot is still up for grabs.

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

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