Re: Great SWT Program

On Dec 15, 8:59 pm, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
Poppy***. Most of the people I know type a fair amount every day and

A "fair amount" is unlikely to be much at all, of course, considering
your ludicrously low values of "a lot".

This is ridiculous. My values are not "ludicrously low". Yours are
clearly "ludicrously high". You seem to require that a person spend 20
hours a day doing nothing BUT writing text before you consider it "a
lot".

none type noticeably differently than I do, except for the ones that
painstakingly hunt and peck, and perhaps 1 or 2 that type in a way
resembling your descriptions. This is a reasonably representative and
random sample of Western computer-users so it should generalize. It
follows that touch is a tiny minority.

Nevertheless, it is the de facto standard for which keyboards are
designed.

No, it is not. Keyboards are designed more or less by just copying
last year's keyboards, which copied the year before's, etc.; keyboard
layout was more or less set in stone decades ago.

There's not even an icon to specifically tell you the state

There doesn't need to be a separate one from the three that already
tell you it just by their presence.

Not if you like mystery GUIs, no.

There's no mystery here. Count the rows of icons, and you count the
windows. It's so simple any kindergarten student can do the counting.
Of course, it's not simple enough for someone like *you*, but then
again, neither is tying your shoelaces or remembering to wipe your
*** after you do your Number Two. :P

You just aren't used to programs being to communicate other than in
long strings of verbose English or code-like gobbledygook made of
ASCII, that's all.

No, I am sure I would prefer software in which the "close window" icon
/actually/ means "this is an MDI application".

That's just your Windows ignorance showing through again. You're used
to cruddy ancient cruft where the ONLY things on the screen are status
indications, labels, and input areas; there are no buttons or menus or
other "active" things of that nature. Now when confronted by one
you're unable to conceive of it conveying information AND having a
function at the same time.

This must be the same sort of software as the one in in which you push
the "Start" button in order to shut down the computer :-)

I typically use the task manager to do that, actually.

They are both.

Of course not.

But they are. I just described how that is so. What is so difficult to
grasp about it?

If Microsoft had meant them to indicate MDI state, they
would have contained iconography to make that very clear.

Why, when that would be redundant clutter? I thought you disliked
clutter and indeed that that was one of your principal objections to
GUIs. You can't have it both ways though!

And even if this one thing WAS a bit blind or awkwardish, you can't
take two steps in your wacky text-mode tools without running into TEN
at-least-as-obscure things, like enter behaving differently from one
open document to the next in emacs while the window looks more or less
the same aside from the text contents.

Briefly. Contrast users of either that try to use emacs and wind up as
statistics. Self-inflicted gunshot here, sleeping pill overdose there,
shot up a 7-11 here, was arrested running through the streets and
babbling incoherently there, nasty divorce here, TRO issued there...

[implied insult deleted]

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

Just finding the application's menu bar
takes a bit of searching and getting used to.

If you're blind.

[accuses me of changing the subject]

*** off, liar. That was a perfectly relevant rebuttal.

No, MS internal politics is irrelevant in a debate about actual
software.

[babbles on some more about politics]

Forget it. You obviously will never cease to twist everything around
to try to imply that I'm an idiot or something. Well, none of the
nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at all true.
And none of this is relevant to how easy it is to tell when it's MDI
and when it's not anyway.

Liar. There is no mention of menus or button bars in the paragraph I
wrote.

Since you were referring to emacs, and emacs has both, you did indeed
attack them even if indirectly.

I was referring to vanilla emacs, idiot. The most recent text-mode-
only emacs in other words.

Not that adding menus and other such stuff to the surface of a hunk of
legacy cruft will change the broken backspace behavior, broken enter
behavior, broken escape behavior, and so forth anyway. (Is there a
single key that does NOT do something wacky and inconsistent in emacs
under obscure circumstances?)

That's a laugh. Half the fucking point of this thread is that emacs
blatantly flouts the conventions of Windows apps, in case you'd
forgotten, idiot.

That is not the point of the thread - it is [insult deleted]

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

And emacs DOES fail to follow most of the conventions of Windows apps,
in case you had forgotten.

In a summary, not in the main text, idiot.

And, of course, a summary contains the salient, central points of the
main text so you certainly reintroduced it as a major point.

Will you *** OFF ALREADY?! CHRIST are you ever frustrating to try to
discuss things with!

I was placing things in a larger context. As in:

* Paragraph about A
* Summary mentioning A and B

That does not reintroduce B into the discussion of A, dimwit.

[insult deleted]

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

I see you're backpedaling furiously again.

[threatens me with bodily harm]

One more of those and I'm notifying the police.

I am conceding

that a mouse does not automatically make things worse.

[calls me a liar]

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

You did indeed concede that a mouse does not automatically make things
worse. Don't try to deny it -- the google groups archive will put the
lie to your denial if you do.


a) There is certainly nothing wrong with the "method" above. Not-X
is the logical inverse of X and exactly one of them is true. If
I assert not-X and you then assert that I asserted X then you
are lying.

[insult deleted]

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

b) Criticism of me is automatically invalid anyway.

So why do you bother responding to it at all?

Because I don't want the final word on the subject to be an incorrect
one. It might confuse some people and cause them to draw erroneous
conclusions. I will keep publicly correcting misinformation and lies
about me promulgated by you and others like you. You cannot make me
stop.

Putting words in my mouth again, Bent? I didn't say anything of the
sort, only that in certain cases auto completion is a crutch to lean
on for those lacking a proper user interface where objects are fucking
clickable!

Ah, in Twisted-speak, "crutch" = "alternative". Good we got that one
cleared up.

No, no, a thousand times no, ***! Stop intentionally
misunderstanding me in order to attack me you cocksucking
motherfucking frustrating son of a fucking bitch!

It depends on how it's used. In one context, auto completion is a
useful tool in a set of tools covering a variety of useful cases. In
another it becomes a crutch, a poor substitute for a better capability
that should be there but is missing.

Think of it as being like a crowbar, a fairly long one. You can use it
to pry open boxes. In a pinch, you can also lean on it because you
have a bum leg, if it's long enough. If you're finding yourself using
it to open boxes there's no problem. If you're finding yourself using
it as a substitute for one of your legs, then you do have a problem.

Similarly, a user interface may have the equivalent of a leg missing
or broken so that you need to use some equivalent of a crowbar to get
around with it, and if that's the case that user interface is bad. On
the other hand it may have the equivalent of a crowbar that you use
for the equivalent of opening boxes, which is not a symptom of any
problem.

In one case it's a crutch. In the other it is not. It isn't just
*what* it is but when it's being used, for what, and why. It's a
crutch when it's a shoddy replacement for a superior alternative
that's unfortunately missing, not whenever and wherever it exists at
all.

Have I now explained it clearly and in enough detail for it to
actually penetrate your dense cranial matter?
.