Re: Great SWT Program

On Dec 28 2007, 9:39 pm, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
[snip]

Error: post too long. Do not post anything over 100 lines again.

Your post, of course, is just as long.

But mine HAS to be. Yours could be much shorter. In fact, yours could
be nonexistent and it wouldn't cost you anything.

[implied insult deleted]

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

Exactly. All it said was insults.

No, it said [insult deleted]

That IS an insult, moron.

Not in the normal world, no.

YES IT IS.

Straw man alert! Torch! Torch!

Because in Twisted-world, rotation, bump-mapping and ray-tracing are
/not/ among the powers of modern graphics hardware.

Sure they are. But I never said I need those from my text editor. Just
a text editor where I can actually see what the *** I'm doing and
navigate around decently.

Then why are you using archaic crud?

I don't, of course, except when professional needs necessitate it.

Which apparently is all the time. What kind of profession, by the way,
insists on nobody modernizing? Some sort of survive-the-EMP-holocaust-
that-will-fry-all-the-microchips-in-2012 type of kooky endeavor? Nah,
they'd insist on doing everything with pen, pencil, paper, and maybe
mechanical adding machines and the like. Only thing that seems to
leave is teaching the legacy crud to the next generation of legacy-
crud teachers, the purpose of which sort of begs the question. :P

No, we are discussing the mini-buffer, not the status line.

Both being a waste of space, in Twisted-world.

No, only the mini-buffer, if permanently displayed even when not in
use. The status bar, by its nature, is always in use, and in modern
applications, toolbars and menu bars need to be accessible at any
time. The title bar on a modern app is arguably dispensible, but it
provides a useful orienting cue as well as a convenient handle to grab
the window by ... although you may not really appreciate such things,
seeing as how you don't seem to care much for any user interface
recent enough to have windows that you can actually pick up and move
in a natural way. :P

Half this fucking thread has been criticism of modern GUI software for
"wasting space" on such things as part of the defense of crufty
ancient text-mode ***. Or haven't you been paying attention??

[denial deleted]

Fortunately, Google Groups will, as always, put the lie to your
attempts to rewrite history and distance yourself from claims you made
that now embarrass you.

No, it is not normal for enter to fail to insert a newline in the big
block of text in the text editor window!

Of course it is

NO, IT ISN'T.

Do a telephone poll of random middle-class Americans if you don't
believe me. (Arguably not a perfectly representative sample, but
they're people that are almost sure to have a) phones and b) some
computer experience while not being biased in any manner that's
relevant here.)

when the user does not want enter to insert a newline

The user of a text editor does want enter to insert a newline. This
follows almost directly from the definition of "text editor" for
chrissake.

A "normal user" being someone with a typical level of computer
knowledge and experience. Who happens to edit text a lot.

Such a user would most likely benefit a lot from being trained in
emacs. [calls me a liar]

Such a user would most likely benefit a lot from you losing net access
before you can manage to convince him to waste his time and money, and
none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

Of course they don't, as I just got through explaining.

[insult deleted]

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

("The user"
being any random person from the huge class you've been peddling emacs
to, of course, rather than a pre-existing experienced emacs user.)

Most of them, of course, will have no trouble absorbing the emacs
training even if they /don't/ have any previous emacs experience.

Of course they will. It's completely alien to every kind of UI
standard, as far as I've been able to determine out of intentional
perversity. Never mind shallow things like key bindings that could be
addressed by rebinding them; this thread has revealed several deep-
seated UI abnormalities and issues that are not "skin-deep" and cannot
be covered up or fixed by cosmetic measures like that. It is simply
not possible to "dress emacs up" in such a way that it will play nice
with normal patterns of computer use and normal user expectations.
They'd have to *un*learn everything they know about operating a
computer, then start over from scratch. It would take weeks and be
horrendously expensive. And afterward they would find all their usual
productivity tools, like Excel, hard to use for the same reason they
would find emacs hard to use otherwise.

Only they can get away with not using legacy cruft like emacs; they
can use more modern text editors. They can't, in all likelihood, get
away with not using Excel and other modern non-text-editor software.
No more work spreadsheets and presentations. No more office documents
in formats their co-workers can use. No more music. No more games. No
more filing their tax returns electronically; it's back to filling out
their tax forms in pen, on physical paper, with a cheap solar
calculator as the only computational aid, and submitting them by paper
mail. In envelopes. With stamps. That cost money. And may not get
delivered on time even if mailed before the deadline.

Ouchies.

This is what would happen if you *succeeded* and they became
proficient with emacs, resulting in everything that ISN'T emacs
becoming hard for them to use, because of course only one of emacs and
everything else can be easy to use at a time.

The smart choice there, of course, is always going to be "everything
else".

Of course it does - it says so right there in the status line.

No it doesn't. It says any of several cryptic things

[irrelevancies deleted]

We are not discussing MDI indicators here. That was in another thread.
And only affected alt-tab vs. ctrl-tab. Guess what -- trying ctrl-tab
first and then alt-tab is foolproof anyway, whereas who knows what
crazy behavior emacs will exhibit if you don't pay very close
attention to that cryptic notification in the status line and have
your emacsese<->English dictionary handy to translate it whenever it
changes?

I have repeatedly pointed out, ever since this thread began, that it
requires training to become proficient with emacs.

And I have repeatedly pointed out, ever since this thread began, that
the very notion of a text editor requiring training to use is
ludicrous. What if your TV came with a remote control that had a 600
page manual and required special training to use? Would you like it if
your kid's trike came with a 400-page manual and handlebars covered
with more controls than in the Space Shuttle cockpit? Would you prefer
a normal iPod or an mp3 player with forty thousand knobs and switches
but no obvious "play", "pause", "next track", or "previous track"
buttons? Said mp3 player needing to be loaded by using some wacky non-
standard gizmo instead of a USB cable connected to a computer, and
arriving with a manual 500 pages longer than the iPod's, of course.

[insult deleted]

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

And there goes your claim of emacs being suitable for use by darn near
everyone.

That is not my claim, of course.

It was. That you have rescinded it is laudable, but at the same time
it's disappointing that you insist on denying ever having made it
instead of admitting your mistake.

YES IT DOES. If emacs is misusing this to not mean what it normally
means then that is just one more black mark against emacs.

We realize by now how much you hate user friendliness :-)

I DO NOT. Stop putting words in my mouth, you lying little prick.

User friendliness is ADHERING TO THE FUCKING STANDARDS NEARLY EVERY
OTHER APP IN EXISTENCE DOES. Lying about where the insertion point
really is and crap like that certainly does NOT qualify as "user
friendly". In fact no archaic box of text glowing green on a black
background like it's the 1970s is "user friendly". :P

(Funny how nostalgia buffs in the computer field always seem to favor
stuff from that particular era. It's never earlier, e.g. punched cards
or toggling everything in manually after each reboot, for some reason,
and never later, like old-skool Windows 3.x era stuff, either. I
wonder why?)

I am trying to explain to you how the ordinary user will see/
experience this. The sort of user you're suggesting drop everything
and spend two entire fucking weeks learning your miserable excuse for
a text editor. You need to realize how they will see your supposedly
superior editor, and thereby understand why you are wrong, Bent.

On the contrary: if they really /do/ edit text a lot, they are quickly
going to see its advantages over Notepad and will likely never look
back.

The only advantage it ever had over Notepad was a larger file size
limit that 64K, and Notepad hasn't had that limit for years, since *at
least* the debut of Windoze XP. :P

If I want something more powerful than Notepad, I will use any of
several editors that are more powerful than Notepad and have just as
easy to use UIs. I will not resort to crap from a bygone era; there's
no need, and if there's some way in which one of those dinosaurs can
outdo Notepad at something useful, there's a modern editor with a
modern UI that can outdo the dinosaur in turn -- or at least perform
that function *as* well while providing a much nicer, more modern user
interface to the feature in question to boot.

Sure, it won't have a built-in newsreader. Who needs one in a text
editor? I'll use Thunderbird.

Sure, it won't have a built-in Mayan calendar. Who needs one? Period.

Sure, it won't have i-search, in all likelihood. Fortunately, we in
the GUI era have far less need of such to get around in our documents.

If I need code-editing-specific stuff I can use Eclipse or NetBeans.

If I need a regexp search I've got a programmer-oriented editor, with
a normal GUI and adhering to all Windows UI norms, that has such a
feature.

If I need any of several other features mentioned as present in emacs,
similarly -- either there's a "normal" text editor with the feature,
or the feature is obsoleted by something more modern like the
scrollbar or clipboard, or the feature is not a text editing feature
at all and there's a dedicated, special purpose app I can use for the
job that is not a text editor and does the job better than anything
*not* specialized for it could ever hope to do.

I have no use for emacs, and I see no use for it in the modern age.

It's 2008 now. Time to stop living in 1978. Get with the times; get up
to speed on modern window system UIs (it should take less than two
weeks and be applicable to nearly every modern application instead of
only one!) and find yourself some useful, modern tools to take the
place of emacs.

Or keep using emacs if you really prefer to, but stop telling everyone
else that they should turn their clocks back three decades and use
that old hunk of junk instead of the modern tools they currently are
very productive with.

This is "cryptic" to anyone without weeks of special-purpose training,

No, normal people actually /understand/ this after [some special-
purpose training]

Exactly.

("All of half a minute"? Bull***. Earlier you said it takes two weeks
and I'm quite sure it actually takes quite a bit longer with anyone
whose level of IT skill is only normal.)

of course, and nothing about Notepad is cryptic in this manner. Nobody
has trouble or requires weeks of training to know what's going on when
they use different applications in Windows, of course.

Try and tell that to the large hordes of people that need to be
retrained for the Vista Office suite :-)

If what you're implying is true, it just means that M$ fucked up Vista
even worse than I originally suspected. Although I'd thought that
applications are, in Vista, still displayed in distinct and easily
identifiable windows much as they have been in every Windows since at
least as far back as 3.1 up until XP?

Go to hell, pervert.
Fucking rich, this, after Bent's spent weeks explaining how even the
most standardized keys everywhere else in the world, like backspace,
esc, and enter, will do surprising and wonky things in emacs

Read: will do useful things that the user wants to happen. [implied
insult deleted]

No, they will do very strange and wonky things. Some of them are,
perhaps, also useful things, but useful things that some other key
should be doing instead so that backspace or whatever can be free to
do as God intended. :P

, and
furthermore do different things from one minute to the next in emacs,

None of the functions in emacs are dependent upon the wall clock.

I never said that. But they might as well be, for all they behave
unpredictably in ways that depend on complex and counterintuitive
factors that in any NORMAL application would not be relevant. Undo,
enter, esc, backspace ... the only one of those four NOT to do so
seems to be esc, which simply CONSISTENTLY does the WRONG thing!

Opening documents is unlikely to put you into a non-editable state

Then why did your example of opening the output from a search do so?

That isn't a document, it's just a grep buffer.

More terminology-quibbling. And wholly irrelevant.

As far as the end-user is concerned, there is no distinction between
one text document and another -- they are all (or, at least, *should*
all be) the same as far as the software is concerned because anything
else is confusing and unpredictable. There is certainly no distinction
between "buffers" and "documents". They opened a text editor. They
opened something in the text editor. Now they have a block of text
displayed in the main part of the text editor. They expect such a
block of text in the main part of a text editor to behave in a certain
way. If it does not, it will upset them. If it *sometimes* does and
*sometimes* does not, it will upset them more. If there is some arcane
rule by which what happens can in principle be predicted from the
source of the text, the phase of the moon, and the price of tea in
China, they will not be appeased -- they want simple and very
predictable, consistent behavior, such as "enter always inserts a
newline at the insertion point in the big block of text inside of a
text editor".

As long as you try to feed them this crud without recognizing that
users want the sort of very simple and predictable UI behavior I just
outlined, then you will keep failing, Bent.

This isn't to say that users don't want powerful features. But they
don't want an overly-complicated UI. They want a simple and
predictable UI, *at least* to the basic features such as entering
text, searching, undoing, copying, and pasting, and navigating the UI,
browsing the help, searching the help, and backing out of prompts and
dialogs. Not to mention exiting the application entirely. They want to
be able to find more complex features when they need to, without them
getting in the way at other times. They want to be able to use those
features, too, and so they want the UI for them to be as simple as
possible, subject to whatever limitations are imposed by the inherent
complexity of the feature in question. If the feature needs a lot of
information from the user to work, then there will probably be a
complex tabbed dialog, and then it needs to be well organized and have
sensible defaults (or remember the previously-used settings, or
something).

Users also don't need useless features and fluff that have nothing to
do with their actual tasks.

Of course, all too many application developers don't get some of this.
Some throw in everything but the kitchen sink and create a cockamamie
Rube-Goldbergian UI, and call it "emacs". Some avoid the kitchen sink
but still overcomplicate the UI of what should be simple
functionality, then call what they wrote "vi". Others avoid complexity
by avoiding any powerful features, and call the results "Notepad".
Still others get complex features in there and keep the use of simple
and basic features simple, only to gum up making the complex features
findable or easily usable, and you get MSOffice. :P

And once in a long while someone gets it just about right and you get
a NetBeans or an Eclipse out of it.

Clear only to an expert, of course.

Of course, in Twisted-world, anyone who has the patience and extreme
willpower required to stick to any one task for more than an hour
straight is an expert by default

Two weeks of training, or had you forgotten already?

[remainder of implied insult deleted]

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

The cryptic cruft no normal human being will be able to interpret

[implied insult deleted]

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

as well as c) how the controls work because they
are standardized, more or less, anyway.

As are they in emacs.

See above: they bloody well are not.

Of course they are. You just don't like the standard because
[implied insult deleted]

THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS!

A single application doing everything differently from ANY OTHER APP
ON EARTH is not at all "standard"! You cannot have a "standard" simply
by having a single application do something a particular way. The word
"standard" implies some broad-based consensus; a large number of
applications of the same genre, some in widespread use, doing
something a certain way.

In the case of text editors, this means that it pretty much has to do
anything that Notepad does the way that Notepad does it, in
particular, though anything that Notepad *doesn't* do it may be freer
to do differently. (That does NOT, of course, extend to things that
you can do in Notepad, such as escape from prompts or backspace in
text, not even in a context like i-search that Notepad lacks.)

There is *nothing at all* that is remotely "standard" about emacs. It
does not even have *internal* consistency as has been repeatedly shown
in the course of this nasty little argument, let alone any consistency
with anything else known to Man.

Oh, and none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about
me are at all true.

Not only do they not correspond
to anything in the way of commonly-used modern software, but they
don't even seem to be standardized *inside of* emacs.

The different emacs modes are remarkably consistent in their key
bindings.

Bollocks! Even such normally-dependable things as the enter key
inserting a newline in the big block of text inside a text editor
cannot be counted on inside emacs depending on its "modes". This
hardly augurs well for somewhat-less-universally-standardized things
like, say, what hitting C-v or shift-insert will do.

The problem being that it provides no natural way to switch tasks

There is, of course, no "natural" way to switch tasks anyway.

Sure there is. In fact there are several, of which of course emacs
honors none.

, and
all applications look the same,

Except, of course, they have different names that are clearly
displayed when they are active.

As I said, they look the same. The different "applications" look as
similar as a *single* Windows (or Mac or even X) application
displaying different *documents*, but do not behave anywhere near as
similar.


even ones that behave enormously
differently (oh, except for the crude prototype "title bar"
equivalent, which is of course in the wrong location, below instead of
above the client area, and therefore where nobody's likely to look for
it...)

Emacs users don't have this particular problem, of course.

Experienced ones probably don't, but experienced emacs users are also
irrelevant here. There's what, perhaps two thousand of them? Compared
to a few hundred million people that fall into the set you seem to
think would benefit from its use.

If only a couple of thousand people out of tens of thousands of times
as many, i.e. less than 0.01% of people, will look there, I think
"nobody's likely to look" there is a fair approximation. We're talking
0.0001 or so of your target market here. Rounding to three significant
figures, as is commonly done, that literally IS nobody.

Bent's a hopelessly ... warped ... individual, I see.

Don't you just love it?

No, I do not.

Desired behavior, as decided by just about all of the people that
you've recommended emacs to but that don't currently use it, would be
for enter to consistently insert a newline into the big block of text.

Not once

YES, IT IS!

I do agree that many may have been tricked to believe otherwise from
whatever tools they used previously [remainder of paranoid ravings
deleted]

What a lunatic. Someone lock Bent up before he hurts someone. If only
me, my sides splitting due to laughter and needing hundreds of
sutures. :P

but normal people in the normal world are
remarkably quick to recognize a superior tool when they see one and
eagerly adapt such.

Think about that carefully, Bent, and about the fact that nobody
normal touches emacs with a ten-foot pole. There's a tantalizing
implication there waiting for you to recognize it, once you grow your
second ever brain cell and it finds your first and grows you your
first ever synapse. :P

Most people can become such a user

Nobody should have to, just to be able to use a fucking *text editor*,

Nobody's forcing them, of course, but once they realize the advantages
they will tend to embrace it.

Indeed. Now notice how nobody much has, in the real world, realized
any "advantages" or tended to "embrace" it. The only thing I'd
"embrace" it with is an Iron Maiden. Several hundred million people
seem to agree with me and nearly everyone else on Earth simply doesn't
use computers at all. :P

To use emacs "very well" certainly takes a lot of training and
frequent use.

Whereas to use some equally-powerful* Windows-native text editors does
not.

Except they don't exist. [implied insult deleted]

Except that they do; you just refuse to admit it; and none of the
nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at all true.

Inconsistency in the UI is ALWAYS a Bad Thing, moron.

Except [snip]

NO. IT IS ALWAYS A BAD THING.

Except, of course, when it is a good thing.

WHICH IS NEVER!!!

Sheesh!

Dense, dense Bent! I've seen fucking magnetars that were less dense.
And had the additional saving grace of frying any modem or other
electronics that they approached. We can only wish that Bent someday
develops such physical properties. :P

It sure as *** is, because whatever it is that's misbehaving can
obviously be replaced with a $200 OLPC laptop for Chrissake.

Yeah, you tell that to your employer "we'll just replace your
99.999%-uptime mainframe with this here OLPC and everything will be
fine - well except it doesn't actually run your business software, but
hey, I get to use a mouse and that's really all that matters anyway".

What the *** are you babbling about? If that mainframe is as legacy
as supposed, it could be replaced with a fairly cheap desktop computer
that would run rings around it and, properly configured, do the same
job but have SIX nines of uptime. Most likely it just needs to be
remotely administered from a desktop machine elsewhere that runs a
nice graphical frontend for whatever needs to be done on the
mainframe, though. Which, if it's as legacy as supposed, is probably
"reboot it", and, once in a blue moon, "turn it off, wait till the
hardware guys to replace something, and THEN reboot it". When legacy
parts get scarce, the data needs to be exported to something sane
(like CSV, just temporarily) and then imported into something open-
source (like OpenOffice), in which case problem solved.
Permanently. :P

If I had
the choice of learning to use awful cruft like emacs or replace the
thing, I'd pay the $200 out of my own pocket and do my bit to
modernize things around the place. :P

Except it wouldn't actually work afterwards

Sure it would. You're just inventing additional hypotheticals purely
for the purpose of trying to make me look like a liar. But I'm not a
liar, Bent; you are.

You would be surprised at how many legacy systems are running
mission-critical tasks around the world.

No. Dismayed, but not surprised. Upgrading them is of course a good
idea, though it progresses slowly for time and budgetary reasons.

And, of course, for "if it's not broken, don't repair it" reasons.

I dare say that if:
a) its software is awful and crufty to use, and
b) it's getting hard to find the right parts for the hardware, and
c) the data is in some legacy format that's increasingly not
supported,
then it's fucking broken and in dire need of repair, just like a tyre
with a slow leak. And the faster it's fixed, the cheaper it will be in
the long run.

Anything remotely sane should be able to export whatever data it
contains in some sort of CSV-type format. Maybe in something wonky
like EBCDIC in terms of the character encoding, but that can be
translated mechanically very cheaply into something sane.

Any software should have a modern equivalent that can import CSV, at
least once it's encoded as ASCII.

If it doesn't export or doesn't import, well, someone may have to
actually code a converter. Hackers managed to reverse engineer the WAD
format of the original DooM in their spare time and start making their
own custom extensions to the game (and in later games, like the Quake
series, id actually officially documented formats and supported user-
made content to some degree, because of what those hackers made, and
how it made the game they were selling more valuable). Motivated with
money someone could surely reverse engineer whatever legacy format in
a similar fashion and make either interoperable modern software or a
converter to a more modern data format. Or both.

In particular, the guys that did the last-minute Y2K fixes to these
same systems could surely do it.

Nonsense. Later VTs may have but VT100s are monochrome.

VT100 uses the ANSI escape codes, which supports red, green, yellow,
blue, magenta and cyan.

VT100 presumably uses a subset of these codes. The VT100 display
hardware does not actually show these colors, after all. Obviously,
then, a color VT100 is as mythical a beast as frigging Bigfoot no
matter WHAT escape sequences it uses.

(P.S. the "light bringer" Lucifer ended up cast down to become Satan.
Are you now claiming to be the Devil, then, Bent?

[implied insult deleted]

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

Go to hell, pervert. (Or should that be: Back! Back into the pit from
whence thee came!)

[implied insult deleted]

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

YES. IT MUST BE ABLE TO PIXEL-ADDRESS THE DISPLAY TO QUALIFY AS TRUE
GRAPHICAL SOFTWARE.

It doesn't need pixel-level acces to display underlining, or different
colours, of course.

But it does to display a proper GUI, of course. And in practise none
of those old terminals could display blue, underlined, clickable
links. Your saying that they could in theory have constructed one that
would does not of course change the fact that NONE ACTUALLY DID!

VT100 is a protocol, if you hadn't noticed.

VT100 is a machine, an ancient monochrome terminal such as you might
hook up to a dial-up modem and use to log on to some ancient Unix
mainframe.

Except, of course, that you have /yourself/ stated, in this very post,
that you require text editors to use the full power of today's
state-of-the-art graphics hardware.

I have not.

Indeed you did.

Not.

You specifically lambasted emacs for not being able to
make use of the full capabilities of modern graphics hardware.

By "modern" I meant "as modern as Windows 95", of course, which would
just mean scalable fonts and other normal Windows-style UI
capabilities. Remember I'm discussing the modern era of software with
standardized GUI interfaces, which began no later than 1995 and really
began all the way back around 1990 or so.

I have said that software can present a vastly improved,
much more user-friendly (and especially new-user-friendly) interface
by using modern graphics capabilities, where by "modern" I meant
"widely available since the mid-90s or thereabouts".

[implied insult deleted]

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

Impossible. There is no "VT100 protocol", there is simply raw ASCII
over a line, usually in those old systems without even error
correction. You also seem to have forgotten that the real, physical
VT100 has a monochrome display. One of the later VT series had color,
and even *that* is an obsolete piece of junk.

The protocol

WHAT protocol? See above. There was no wire protocol to speak of.
There was raw ASCII over a line. Some clever stuff was transmitted OOB
using escape sequences and other crufty mechanisms, but of course the
VT100 with its monochrome display could not support any escape
sequences that purported to specify color text.

[some vicious insults deleted]

*** off, asswipe.

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


[insult deleted, but Bent made no *meaningful* response to the above]

Aha -- gotcha!

[insult deleted]

It was, of course, genuinely meaningless.

[implied insult deleted]

No, what YOU wrote was meaningless, fucktard.

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

(See how Bent responds to being proven wrong? With insults instead of
apologies or anything civil or reasoned. Tsk, tsk.)

[implied insult deleted]

Go to hell.

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

My claim didn't involve telepathy at all, it concerned itself with
altogether more mundane functionality.

Functionality that happens to require telepathy to implement properly,
mind you.

Perhaps in Twisted-world. In the normal world, emacs did it a couple
of decades ago.

Except that it didn't, as I demonstrated by exhibiting a case in which
it would indeed fail to alert you "instantly" when you had to modify
your query to get to the specific spot you were looking for.

(The kind of thing that makes me thank God it's not the seventies
anymore and we now have nice things like scrollbars and scroll-wheels
for navigation; things far less finicky and fickle than using search
for such a purpose.)

I did not say this.

YES YOU DID.

[calls me a liar or insane; not sure which]

Go to hell.

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

That much is true. But it is not what you originally said.

[insult deleted]

No. Nothing about me is "faulty". None of the nasty things that you
have said or implied about me are at all true.

Babbling again, Bent?

[insult deleted]

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

You claimed that it behaves in a certain way. That way is one that
everyone with a brain and a bit of computer-using experience will know
is broken and awkward.

[implied insult deleted]

Note for the record: Bent had nothing of relevance to say in response
to the above.

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

There's nothing wrong with it if it deletes the character it's
supposed to, moron.

It always deletes the character it's /supposed to/, of course.

No, it does not. You yourself have claimed that it sometimes fails to
delete any characters at all, even when you're not all the way at the
far left with no characters further left to delete.

It does, of course.

So much for your objection to sensible backspace behavior, then.

There is no connection - you [insult deleted]

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

You said that the sensible backspace behavior would result in losing
access to earlier search results. We have since found out that a) that
same problem would have plagued typing a new letter to add to the
query and b) it doesn't actually happen anyway because the search
wraps. So your objection to sensible backspace behavior proved not to
hold water. Hardly surprising; this always happens when someone
objects to something sensible. More or less by definition of
"sensible".

Because I long since purged every trace of that execrable piece of
crap from my hard drive and absolutely refuse to ever let it back on
there, and therefore don't have a copy in front of me, that's why.

[insult deleted]

No matter. It suffices that I have used it, whether or not I keep a
personal copy.

And, of course, none of the nasty things that you have said or implied
about me are at all true.

Typing a B into an i-search will add a B to the end of the search
term, and find the next match for the new search term (which may be
the current match) if there is one.

And skip any earlier match that might exist. I rest my case.

[insult deleted]

See above. You objected to sensible backspace behavior (i.e. always
delete the character to the left if there is one) on the grounds that
supposedly you'd lose access to some search results for "foo" if you
searched for "foob", moved a hit or two forward, and then backspaced
the "b" and the "b" immediately disappeared.

But now we know that that was another lie, Bent. Suppose the document
was:

foo
foob
foob
foov
foobar

Search for "foob" and you're at the second line above. Hit next-match
twice and you're at the final line. Backspace the "b" and with proper
backspace behavior you'd still be at the final line with "foo" in the
query. The final line is of course a hit for "foo", but not the first.
You apparently didn't like this.

But with the wonky backspace behavior, you have to backspace three
extra times, and end up on line two with the "foo" in the first "foob"
selected, STILL not the first hit for "foo".

Search for "foo", hit next-match three times to land at "foov", and
type "b", and you're on the last line, NOT the first hit for "foob".

And of course hit next-match one or more times from there and you WILL
end up back at the first "foo" or "foob" as appropriate, eventually.

Your original objection to having backspace behave normally appears to
provide equally valid objections for the ACTUAL backspace behavior,
AND the behavior when typing another letter, AND seems pointless when
the search wraps anyway.

This is ignoring the notion of having backspace jump you to the first
hit and then apply the backspace.

Or, even better, the behavior you'd need to get what you ACTUALLY
seemed to want, which is that if you backspace from "foob" to "foo"
you're back on the first hit for "foo", and that's that backspacing a)
removes a letter from the query and THEN b) jumps back to the first
hit for the query, instead of the other way around. Perhaps also
adding a letter should jump you to the first hit for the query, so
being at "foov" above with a "foo" query and typing a "b" would put
you on line two instead of the last line.

Actually, though, if I were to use this crap editor of yours at all
I'd prefer the current letter-typed behavior and backspace to just
backspace, so typing the "b" would put me on the final "foobar" line,
and deleting the second "o" would leave me on the "foov" line and, of
course, actually delete the "o" promptly with only one tap of
backspace.

You cannot presume to know what circumstances will be faced by the
users that you plan to inflict this horror upon! They are far better
placed to decide what they want than you are. Let them be!

They may be - but you are not.

Yes, I am. I edit text a lot too, as it just so happens.

I like this thread quite a lot

Hardly anybody else does.

Exactly - let it live I say! Let it live!

More evidence that Bent likes inflicting unpleasantness on other
people, the sadistic prick.

[calls me a liar]

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

I don't respond well to threats.

[calls me a liar and further insults me]

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

***.

Eloquent closing remark, that.

Indeed -- concise and to the point.
.