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

[Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer cs nmsu edu>]

   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.

You're stepping into a religious war here.  While I've reluctantly
started using ApplixWare for my word processing, I don't intend to part
with Emacs any time soon.  The bottom line is that I can move around
faster with those weird escape and control sequences faster than I can
with arrow keys, and 'way faster than I can with a mouse.  While mouse
support for moving around should be there (Emacs has it....), we can't
lose the ability to do it from the keyboard.

What's needed isn't vi bindings, nor Emacs bindings, but a flexible
scheme in which a user can assign arbitrary key sequences to
pointer-moving operations.  The default bindings should be Emacs,
though, of course :)
-- 
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D.       Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science       FAX   -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University          http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer