On Tue, Sep 14, 1999 at 09:56:24AM -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> Info keybindings are virtually identical to Emacs, and thus don't feel
> at all stupid to this Emacs user. In fact, I would be VERY annoyed if
But consider what it used to be like - the curses info browser was very
confusing because the motion keys weren't bound quite in the same way as
those in Emacs (or anything else for that matter).
> the info maintainers heeded Havoc's advice and redid the keybindings
> in the image of, say, vi.
I'd be surprised if any effort to improve ease of use chose to
standardise on vi (unless nethack has a sudden burst of popularity,
anyway).
> Keith> Dselect? Nice in many ways; yes, it's the non-standard
> Keith> keystrokes and lack of visual feedback ("has my search finished
> Keith> yet?") that are probably the worst things. Other than that *I*
> Keith> can't think of a much nicer way to address package installation
> Keith> in ncurses.
> That's right. And I have to disagree that the general flow of control
> in dselect "doesn't make sense" and "this has _zero_ to do with the
> power of the tools". Change the flow of control and I bet you'll lose
> some flexibility somewhere.
Better prompting and visual feedback would probably go a long way to
making the flow of control seem better - one common source of problem
is your idea of what's going on diverging from that of dselect. It
would also be nice to be able to defer conflict resolution sometimes,
not to mention the *!?# recommends handling and the forced display of
the help screen.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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