On Fri, 7 May 2021 at 18:29, Thomas Desi <t...@mttw.at> wrote: > > Maybe those legacy editors are still around in discussion because of their > „paradigmas“ they created > around editing text on a computer.
Well, yes. > Editor „Brief“ refers maybe besides other features to „incremental“ Home / > End Keys (e.g. first HOME press moves caret to Start-Of-Line, a second press > moves the caret a line up, till Start-of-File) or more in general to key > commands which became models for period of time for many editors. Aha! Interesting. I have not heard of that before. > Hard to say one is better then the other. We only became „locked into“ a > system in the last 50 years. Very true. But there is real value in having a near-universal system. IBM CUA came in at the end of the DOS era, but has persisted in some forms... Windows, all the mainstream xNix desktops, OS/2, and even Mac OS X hew to it to some degree. OS X more than Classic MacOS. It's partly why I do not use Vim or Emacs. I learned editors in the early 1980s, when every one was totally different and many computers had multiple different editors. I was au fait with dozens and switched easily. CUA came as a huge relief; after it, one model and one UI worked everywhere. I don't care _how_ much editing power Vim or Emacs may have; they do not conform to the dominant UI of the last 35+ years, and as such, I am not interested in learning yet another UI. I will use the one that works in Notepad, Gedit, Leafpad, Mousepad, Kate, Geany, Text Edit, EDIT.EXE, EDITOR.EXE, etc. etc. > So each and every text editor (especially those) provokes a quasi-religious > attitude of the user > towards the computer and its behaviour. Exactly so, yes. > Adding pull-down menues or calling the menue by pressing F10 or F1 for Help… > Most of these conventions are gone because of the ubiquity of the mouse or > touchpad. True. > Printing, which has been such a killer issue, has become IMHO much less > important lately, as most text feed into the web (blogs) or Emails. PDF as > the main currency. Word’s doc format unfortunately is asked nearly in every > domain as the common denominator. Be green - use your screen! True. > Designing a *complete* system for editing text must include the actual > keyboard layout, dedicated keys, the pointing device, the editor software > (yeah), and the… operating system. All need to finally feed into the > „ergonomic“ aspect (key-chording in legacy Emacs can in bad cases lead to > injury of the hands), free the unnecessary mental load (editing prose in > vi/vim having in mind which mode one is in, is mindf**k). The two paradigma > Emacs/Vi(m) are rather similar in contrast to the ACME and SAM editors, using > the three button mouse. Agreed. > And just to mention it, there once was Jef Raskin's „Canon Cat“. His > paradigma of „all is text“ (like Rob Pike’s ACME?) but denying the use of the > mouse in favour of a copyrighted „Leap“ key, which basically is Emacs’ > search-command. Gaining seconds but asking the user to retype typos in order > to move the caret to that spot. It is amazing how these geniuses were > somewhat wrong in predicting the future despite the objective superiority of > their concepts. Raskin’s work (Swyft card, THE, ARCHY) dove into oblivion. Ha! As I read your message, I thought of the Cat. I wish someone would do a clone of its UI using normal PC keyboards and (say) Emacs as its base. It was an inspired design. > > Rob Pike in 1991 wrote an article ( > http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/help/help.pdf ) which is still worth > reading. Let me quote: "Where will we be ten years from now? CRT’s will be a > thing of the past, multimedia will no longer be a buzzword, pen-based and > voice input will be everywhere, and university students will still be editing > with emacs. Pens and touchscreens are too low-bandwidth for real interaction; > voice will probably also turn out to be inadequate. (Anyway, who would want > to work in an environment surrounded by people talking to their computers?) > Mice are sure to be with us a while longer, so we should learn how to use > them well.“ > > Did he say „ten years“? 1991 is now thirty years ago… :-/ > He didn’t speak about tablets/smartphones - but have you tried working with > text editing on a touch-screen? Orrrgh. Oh my yes. > Today one can easily realize one’s own design of a keyboard, or have extra > special macro keyboards, or pointing devices like roller mouse, trackpad, > magic mouse etc. > Still the software lacks enormously, especially for text editing in prose. > Sound’s pretensiously silly, I know. > But, Keyboard Commands seem for many people old fashioned and awkward in Text > editing, navigating, working with the system. It’s all absurdly bloated, > even the computer system is enormous. I agree again. We are going backwards nowadays. > Looking back at those thoughts, designs and ideas of thirty+ years ago, using > DOS, trying out maybe Plan9 (hmm…?) is worthwhile to get an idea that there > is more to computing than windows, linux or MacOS, more than MS-Word. This > can only achieved if the software enters a status of „oldtimer“, like with > cars in Europe, where after a while the whole issue of individual rights > might of design ideas become „open source“ out of public interest. This might > be very Un-American, right, I am writing from an European perspective. I don't know if you know, but Plan 9 and Acme, Rio etc. were inspired by an earlier OS, called Oberon. It is still around, runs on modern PC hardware, is FOSS, and is astonishingly small and fast. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
