Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 12:47:32 +0200 (MET DST) From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) To: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber) Cc: chat@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Chat) Subject: Re: icons (was: FreeBSD keyboard) Message-ID: <199607161047.MAA17395@allegro.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.94.960715115825.5534C-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> from "John Fieber" at Jul 15, 96 12:35:57 pm
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John Fieber writes: > > 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). I'm not sure what you see as the difference between function orientation and task orientation. Both terms suggest the same thing to me. In any case, looking at the Emacs menus, I can't see that they're that bad, though I don't know many examples of good menus. > 2) Are the control-shift-alt-meta-hyper-x r control-meta-b > commands really that efficient? Sometimes. > 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. I use these multiple bucky things for inserting various *roff sequences into texts. For example, S-f8 will put me in nroff-fill mode, and if I then hit S-f1, I'll get \fI\fP\|. I don't do that often, so hand strain doesn't become a problem. When writing in C, f5 will indent the next line correctly. In a case like that, I can move my hand sideways to the F key and maybe hold it down and let it repeat. If the F keys are at the top, I need to suspend my whole hand to avoid touching the main keyboard, and I can no longer rest my elbows on the armrest of the chair. > 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). You don't have to use them. But it's nice to have them if you need to. Greg
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