On Sat, May 22, 1999 at 12:21:02PM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote: > On Sat, 22 May 1999, Michael Stone wrote: > > I disagree: I think it's still more complicated than it needs to be. > > Complicated? > > > E.g., the big block of commands at the upper left is a bit too > > cluttered. > > Upper left? You _are_ refering to the help screen aren't you? This screen > coveres the top third of the screen, and includes every operation ae will > perform. How would you suggest that I make it less "cluttered"? > > The phrase, "a bit too cluttered" is not something I can convert into a > patch ;-)
I'm talking about the area of the help screen with file read/write, version, exit and quit. There are a lot of functions crammed into that area. (And the differences between them are not necessarily intuitive: what is the immediately obvious difference between exit and quit for someone coming from windos?) > > The prompts sometimes leave something to be desired (When I > > type ^X^C after changing a file, why does the prompt have n^H at the end > > of it?) > > This is a bug that both the author and myself have been unable to resolve. > It seems to be an artifact of key encoding, but, since the error isn't > obvious, it could just as easily be caused by something else (like a > curses difficulty of a completely different nature). As it is only visual > cruft, and doesn't effect the opperation of the program, I have not been > too frantic about it... But I'm looking at it from the standpoint of whether it's easy for a novice to use. I actually made ae the default editor for a little while on one of my systems, but found that new users were too easily confused. Visual artifacts might not be a big deal for those who understand them, but they can be intimidating for newbies. > > And it _is_ possible for people to get trapped in ae--but people > > While this was true for several "broken" releases of ae, this has not been > possible for a long time. The reason this missinformation remains in play > for so long is that folks continue to use old, broken rescue disks. The > current version of ae does not suffer from this problem, and hasn't for > some time. > > > are able to escape ee by typing the escape key and answering the > > prompts. I'd like to merge this last line with the part above; what I meant by this is that some people might not understand the ^key nomenclature. (Again, not immediately obvious.) But most people, once trapped in an editor, hit the escape key. In ee, that pops up a menu, one of which items is an option to exit. So if nothing else, at least the new user can get out of their editing session... Mike Stone
