> If the chunk in front of the cursor is big you have the the options of
> - doing nothing
> - selecting the big chunk
> - immediately delete the big chunk
> - doing something even weirder.
The point is that a user does not think of a formula as chunks of
anything - of course they are implemented as nested insets, but they
all look like characters on the screen (not images or tables, unless
there really is a table involved) and I expect that pressing backspace
= delete one character. I am now convinced the "backspace = just jump
into the inset, don't delete a character" behavior is weird and
undesirable.
> If I put the cursor at the end of a document and put the cat on the
> backspace key I expect the document completely deleted after a while.
> This would not be possible with your solution as it would leave empty
> insets behind.
No, the empty insets would be deleted: after a backspace the cursor
jumps inside the inset and deletes the last character, leaving the
cursor inside the inset. After the characters of the inset have been
deleted the cursor is sitting inside an empty inset. Pressing
backspace deletes it. So the cat would be effective after all.
So one way to describe this behavior is "implied left arrow before
deleting a char when the cursor is right adjacent to an inset" which
would be applied recursively: this means backspace would delete the
last "n" in the following formula and leaving the cursor in the base
of the exponent
\sum_{n\geq1}\frac{1}{n^{2}}
David
