John Levon wrote:
On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 09:25:24PM +0200, Michael Gerz wrote:
Sorry but I have to disagree strongly. Why on earth do we have "cut" &
"paste" in the "edit" menu? Because it is so efficient to use the menu?
Definitely not! Because every word processor has it? Ugh, didn't John
teach us for years that this is an invalid reason and we need a
reasonable design rationale instead?
Cut and paste is surely better done with:
* keyboard only, or -
* mouse only - mark the text then drag the selection off somewhere.
But it must be in the menus too, because there is no standard
cut & paste keys on keyboards. Apps do this differently. Newbies
don't know which key to use - so they look it up in the menu. When
They get tired of that, they read the kbd shortcut string in the menu,
and start using that.
The menus have (at least) two purposes:
* A place to stick little-used alternatives
* Documentation of our nice keyboard shortcuts. This is what xemacs so
nice too. Everything can be done by key, but if you don't know
the key, you at least know where to fins it.
Actually that wasn't what I said. "Other WPs have it" is actually a good
reason for something. But everything must be measured up in terms of
pro's and con's.
You might be surprised at how many people actually use those menu items.
I've seen a lot of pretty competent users do so. They're a
LONG-standing tradition, and we would seriously faze a lot of people if
they weren't there.
In comparison, consider File->Save. Whilst traditional, it's the cause
of a huge amount of usability problems and really needs to die in every
application. I have little hope of this ever happening alas.
Please tell - what is the problem with File->Save? Logically,
saving is an operation on a file. What do you want instead,
document->save? Or something completely different?
Helge Hafting
