Re: ::scr Towards a better text editor

[simon wistow <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 02:06:23PM +0100, Richard Clamp said:

> Eh?  Sorry, what?  Doesn't scan.  What's 'this'?

Muddling text modes.

> I'd learned the interface, oddly you seem to need to do that with
> chopsticks, walking, and sometimes even software.

Ok, to borrow from Orwell - all interfaces are unintuitive (except the nipple)
but some are less unintuitive than others.

I just don't think that Emacs is intuitive - not even internally. 

Mark made a good point about this when I first bought this up 
http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/2001-July/002223.html

Celia would be good to jump in here about intuitiveness and interfaces [hint
hint].

An example of two different ways of doing stuff

To turn off javascript in Netscape

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Enable javascript

To do that IE

Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level -> Scroll Down huge list
-> Active Scripting -> Enable

Now I'm not saying that either of those is immediatley intuitive but the
Netscape one is better IMHO. I can never remember how to do it in IE.


> That's an interesting one - a new-speak for editor extension
> languages, making it impossible for you to implement bad modes.  I
> await the spec.

I didn't say editor extensions though - I said a macro language. Ultraedit has
a macro language that lets you simulate any keypress or menu option ... but
nothing else. And I don't really need it to do more. Ok, yes, it would be nice
in some ways to have the document API exposed to a scripting language like
Perl but not strictly necessarily. See below about feature creep.

> You have to stop?  Surely if it's modular and demand loading you don't
> need to worry unduly about this.

Yes, I think you have to stop. Feature creep is a bad thing and just makes
stuff too complicated. Interfaces are especially susceptible to this.

There is the argument that you raise that people should be able to add
features later using a modular system. So what you're saying is that you want
a simple text editor with an exposed document API that allows modular loading
of extensions.

Like I said, I'm not interested in slagging off other editors per se or the
people who use them just trying to find out if people would like in a text
editor if they were designing from scratch. If you think Emacs is perfect then
that's fine and you're lucky because you've got the perfect text editor.






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: nature notes for the apocalypse