Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 12:35:57 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de> Cc: FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: icons (was: FreeBSD keyboard) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.94.960715115825.5534C-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <199607151123.NAA04607@allegro.lemis.de>
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On Mon, 15 Jul 1996, Greg Lehey wrote:
> This may the case when the number of choices is small. When you
> consider the number of key combinations which Emacs recognizes, menus
> become very inefficient. I introduced my wife to Emacs just a few
> weeks ago, showing her the menus at the top of the screen, but she
> prefers to use the key combinations because it's easier than
> navigating all the menus.
A couple counterpoints:
1) It would be difficult to design menus worse than those that
come with emacs. Xemacs is marginally better, but not a lot.
What makes them difficult to navigate is that they are
function oriented. Look around at easy to use menus and the
common factor is not size, but a task oriented organization
(which, regretably comes with a different set of limitations).
2) Are the control-shift-alt-meta-hyper-x r control-meta-b
commands really that efficient? Bringing it back to
keyboards, what about hand strain? Back when I was a regular
emacs user, I actually unbound many of the cursor movement
commands from alphabetic keys, forcing myself to use the
keypad. It slowed me down a tiny bit, but my hands sure felt
better.
3) Emacs has too many functions! ;-)
It represents CISC architecture in its peak. I've been a long
time emacs user, but have ditched for a "user friendly' RISC
editor (nedit) and must say that there are very few features of
emacs that I really miss (syntax highlighting, and psgml mode).
(editor flames > /dev/null)
-john
== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================
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