Re: Questions

[Ilan Volow <raskinite yahoo com>]

Delmar Watkins wrote:

>Tabbing in bash is like IOS, except that it gives no
>context, and the command set it still pretty obscure.
>To use a command that you don't know, you have
>to first do an"apropos", then man that command, then
>slowly and meticulously go through the options, and
>god forbid you type in something incorrectly (it
won't
>show you where you are wrong).  And if you do type
>something incvorrectly, you could seriouslyscrew
>things up.

What I'd really like to see in future gnome/shell
interfaces is Jef Raskins concept of LEAP, which
existed on the canon cat (dammit I want to find one of
those on eBay). From what I could understand from his
description in the Humane interface, it was kind of
like search-forward and search-backwards in Emacs
(C-s, C-r). You hit the forward LEAP key and type the
first few letters of a word, and immediately the
cursor jumps forward to that word. Hit the forward
LEAP key again, and the cursor jumps forward to the
next instance of that word. And the same goes for the
reverse LEAP key, except in reverse. A unix shell with
leaping would kick so much ass. This couldn't only be
used for navigating text, but could also be used for
navigating through GUI widgets. If you had a text
entry field labeled "e-mail", you could hit some key
assigned to the forward leap function and start typing
"e-" and you would instantly get focus on the text
field. I think that this method of keyboard navigation
would be far superior to the current paradigm we have
in GNOME, which clutters up everything (including the
user's cognitive processes) with silly little
underlines. Instead of remembering what combination of
what keys activates what, you're simply typing in the
first few letters of the of a widget's name. And this
should be pretty easy to code in gtk, too. 

--Ilan



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