Re: [gtk-list] Re: vi bindings for text widgets

[Michael Poole <poole graviton res cmu edu>]

Steve Hosgood <iisteve@iiweeble.swan.ac.uk> writes:

> > On Fri, 3 Jul 1998, matt wrote:
> > > what is the possiblity of someone hacking in
> > > vi bindings into the text and text entry widgets?
> > >
> 
> Shevek replied:
> > Yes please. I think this would be a very good idea, maybe an input mode
> > like bash has for readline.
> > 
> 
> Please, no!
> Why can we never break with the past and move forwards? Vi and Emacs and
> other such things were fine in their time, i.e the late 1970's and early
> 1980's when the "glass-TTY" with programmable cursor-control was the latest
> thing to have, and the lack of anything much more than an alphanumeric
> keyboard forced the use of weird mode-switching and strange ctrl-meta key
> sequences in order to implement a screen editor at all.
>
> But now we're in the late 1990's! We've got decent keyboards. We've got
> mice. We've got X.

    Perhaps not everyone is familiar with these results, there have been 
studies on how efficiently you can input data with a keyboard vs with a
mouse.  Results: several bits of information per keystroke, and up to
several keys per second, but much less than one bit of data per second
with a mouse.  Add time to move your hands from the main part of a keyboard
to a mouse (or even to arrow keys and back), and you lose lots of time.
I'd really prefer that my computer not waste my time gratuitously -- and
any time I have to move to the mouse after I've been typing for some time
is a loss of a second or so.  Gtk apps that I've used tend to make me do
this for the following reasons:

* a dialog pops up (no default focus, no way to change input focus without
  using a mouse)
* I want to use a menu (the apps are probably just too new to make wide
  use of accelerators)

    Now, over the course of a day or so, that's a lot of times that I have
to switch to the mouse, so that's a lot of time that is wasted.  No matter
how nice the GUI looks, it doesn't matter if I can't work efficiently; I'll
just go back to text mode in that case.

> Time to forget Vi and Emacs and move to Nedit, gedit and other modern editors!

    Um, yeah.  Now compare the functionality.
    Personally, XEmacs is my editor of choice -- for the sole reason that
it lets me work more efficiently.  I can write code, and get the benefits
of syntax highlighting in any programming language I know; I can read news
and mail; and I can (with 20.x) write in foreign languages easily.  All
this without needing to use the mouse more than once every 10 minutes or so.

> I consider that Vi-like support for readline was a serious mistake. It
> means that you can't just lean over a colleage's shoulder and type a couple
> of commands on his/her terminal (this happened to me a couple of weeks
> ago). Why isn't there any mouse support for readline?

    I don't understand what you're saying -- what keeps you from typing a
few commands over a colleague's shoulder?  How would mouse support for
readline be an improvement?  Under VTYs in Linux, the mouse is better
used for cut and paste, and under X, it's used for a zillion other things.

> BTW, before anyone tells me off, I started with 'ed' in 1978. I was one of
> those who migrated to the wizzo new glass-TTY technology and Vi when I
> got the chance in the early 1980's. I kept to a Vi clone when I spent 6
> years in the DOS wilderness 1988-1994. Then I got linux and X and moved
> over to Nedit.
> 
> I'm overjoyed to have finally escaped from Vi, just as I was happy to lose
> 'ed' all those years ago. Doesn't anyone else want to move with the times, or
> am I some sort of techo-mobile weirdo?

    I'm surprised that someone who has worked with computers as long hasn't
noticed that the keyboard is, in fact, a much more efficient input device
than the mouse is.  "Moving with the times" does not imply making the same
mistakes that Microsoft has made with their user interfaces -- did you
notice those new keys that Microsoft got all the PC keyboard manufacturers
to add -- the ones that let you do VIA THE KEYBOARD something that is
perfectly easy to do via the mouse?  Microsoft found out after they had
released Windows 95 that the Start Menu and that sort of thing were slowing
people down.  So they came up with a Microsoft Solution (make somebody else
to fix stupid mistakes they made)[1].

    Do you really want to spend the next year or two watching people
implement the next Killer App with a wonderful mouse-oriented GUI, only to
find that you can't do as much work with it as somebody in [x]emacs?  For
an example, look at Nedit -- almost every menu item has a keyboard
accelerator.  How often do you use the menu item, and how often do you use
the accelerators?

    Certainly, it's easy to make poor choices in key bindings, but the
poorest of them all is to make the mouse the only way to do commonly done
things.

[1] - I am intentionally overlooking the pre-existing shortcuts that existed,
but which were discarded for some reason I could care less about -- probably
because Microsoft thinks all of their users are stupid.