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

[Steve Hosgood <iisteve iiweeble swan ac uk>]

George wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 07, 1998 at 02:43:50PM -0500, Gerald Combs - Unicom Communications wrote:
> >   This is precisely why I like NEdit [...] I've found that people tend to
> >   pick up on it a lot faster than vi's edit/insert modes and key mappings.
> 
> it does a very small fraction of what vi does ... how do you do
> 
> d5w
> 

STOP STOP STOP!!
We were doing very well up to now with an interesting debate on the pros and
cons of configurability. But it's just about to degenenerate into an
editor-war, which I'm sure none of us want.

Who cares if you can or can't do "d5w" in NEdit? You can't do a "mouse
driven rectangular text-delete" in Vi! But that's not the point:


In order to implement such Vi-style keysequences in GTK, you'd have to bloat
the code to implement vi's "modal" mentality in (say) GTK text widget.
Normally, if you're in the text widget and type "d5w" the characters "d", "5"
and "w" would appear on screen. You cetainly wouldn't get 5 words deleted
(which is what a Vi user might expect).


Now the question is, would we as GTK users want to have additional code in
GtkText to support mode-switching and all these Vi sequences (plus all the
equivalent Emacs alternatives)?

I say no. As someone else pointed-out, GTK is a GUI widget set. GUI stands
for *Graphical* user interface! If some people find that a GUI gets in the
way of their productivity (and I don't deny that for a fast typist it probably
does) then maybe they're in the wrong list!

gtk-list is here for us to swap notes on GTK, the GUI toolkit. Maybe someone
ought to get up a parallel project called TTK (standing for "Textual Tool Kit")
used for building TUIs (Textual User Interfaces)! That's where all this Vi
support belongs surely?



Interestingly, it seems that the original thrust of the "Vi bindings"
subject may have gone two ways from what I read here. There's the "Vi
mode GtkText" approach mentioned above (of which I disapprove as you can see),
and there's the simpler question of whether vi-like or 'emacs-like' or
'motif-like' sequences are used for menu accelerators.

I don't have much complaint about the latter, as at least it wouldn't
add any serious bloat, and I liked the suggestion I saw here about having
a way to switch an application from "user's preferences" to and from "GTK
standard" as a simple operation. That seemed to kill quite a few birds with
one stone, allowing user freedom *and* the ability to run an application on
someone else's desktop without having to learn his baroque shortcuts!

--

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