On Jun 20, 5:03 pm, Kaldrenon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I still have a good deal to learn, even of the basics, but I've toyed > with it casually for a little bit (a total of two hours at most, but > almost certainly less) and I already know enough that finding out how > to do anything else IS trivial. It's not a program whose controls > throw themselves at you, exactly, but with a touch of patience and a > genuine interest in learning, it's not too bad.
I don't know what software you're describing, but it's obviously not emacs, unless there have been some HUGE changes to (at minimum) the help and pane-navigation (er, excuse me, "window"-navigation) controls... My experiences (with emacs and with a lot of other supposedly- superior, usually unix-heritage software) put me in mind of an analogy: fumbling around in a strange house in the dark without a flashlight, banging into furniture frequently, trying to find a light switch, but it turns out the switches are all spring-loaded. For some reason (saving electricity and fighting the war against global warming?) if you go to start doing anything else the light goes off again immediately -- so you have to stand there holding the switch, memorize the contents of the room, and then quickly do whatever you needed to do before your memory of the room's layout and where things are fades! Then back to the switch, or trip and fumble your way to a different room's switch...wash, rinse, repeat... Nobody would actually design a home (or a workplace) like that in a trillion years, global warming be damned. So why do people still sometimes design software like that? Oh and did I mention that these houses' layouts are also totally strange, with the living room on the top floor and the kitchen in the basement, or other things of that nature, so you can't transfer any knowledge of conventional home designs to aid in your navigation there...and they are even all different from one another, nevermind "normal" houses... BTW, is anyone else finding Google Groups especially ornery of late? I get all of the following, recurrently: * I enter one reply in a thread, and it works. Then I go to make a second reply, and I get a text box like one uses to enter a reply, except evidently read-only -- I can select text but there is no blinking cursor. * The fix seems to be to navigate off the page and back. Unfortunately, that then pops up some dialog. I think GG is trying to protect me from losing unsaved changes, except that there are obviously no unsaved changes to the (read-only!) form for me to lose! * The "back" button is wonky -- it seems to require hitting back *twice* to go back *one* page to the previous page of the thread or to the newsgroup's thread index, if already on the first (or only) page. * After *that*, "forward" behaves sometimes normally and sometimes as "forward and then click a reply link on some random post"?? * Submitting a post results in the form disappearing and being replaced by "The post was entered successfully". Of course, if it turns out to have NOT been all that successful as evidenced from refreshing the page or using an external newsserver (I have found one read-only one suitable for verifying that a posting succeeded and propagated beyond GG's server), there's no way to get back to the form to try to resubmit the text, or even to recover it to the clipboard to paste into a fresh form for a fresh attempt. So far, it's never actually lied and claimed a posting was successful that wasn't, but there's a first time for everything, and we all know the track record for QA in the software industry ... and the way one of the more common failure modes of software is silent failure, claiming success on failure, claiming failure on success, or claiming one failure when a different failure happened! (All the various forms of diagnostics failure...) I guess I have to pre-emptively copy the form contents to the clipboard before clicking submit, and preserve the clipboard contents pending verification, or risk catastrophic data loss, because GG can't be arsed to make a decent interface, or even to leave well enough alone and stop constantly changing it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
