Re: An 'ae' testimony
On Sat, May 22, 1999 at 12:21:02PM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> On Sat, 22 May 1999, Michael Stone wrote:
> > I disagree: I think it's still more complicated than it needs to be.
>
> Complicated?
>
> > E.g., the big block of commands at the upper left is a bit too
> > cluttered.
>
> Upper left? You _are_ refering to the help screen aren't you? This screen
> coveres the top third of the screen, and includes every operation ae will
> perform. How would you suggest that I make it less "cluttered"?
>
> The phrase, "a bit too cluttered" is not something I can convert into a
> patch ;-)
I'm talking about the area of the help screen with file read/write,
version, exit and quit. There are a lot of functions crammed into that
area. (And the differences between them are not necessarily intuitive:
what is the immediately obvious difference between exit and quit for
someone coming from windos?)
> > The prompts sometimes leave something to be desired (When I
> > type ^X^C after changing a file, why does the prompt have n^H at the end
> > of it?)
>
> This is a bug that both the author and myself have been unable to resolve.
> It seems to be an artifact of key encoding, but, since the error isn't
> obvious, it could just as easily be caused by something else (like a
> curses difficulty of a completely different nature). As it is only visual
> cruft, and doesn't effect the opperation of the program, I have not been
> too frantic about it...
But I'm looking at it from the standpoint of whether it's easy for a
novice to use. I actually made ae the default editor for a little while
on one of my systems, but found that new users were too easily confused.
Visual artifacts might not be a big deal for those who understand them,
but they can be intimidating for newbies.
> > And it _is_ possible for people to get trapped in ae--but people
>
> While this was true for several "broken" releases of ae, this has not been
> possible for a long time. The reason this missinformation remains in play
> for so long is that folks continue to use old, broken rescue disks. The
> current version of ae does not suffer from this problem, and hasn't for
> some time.
>
> > are able to escape ee by typing the escape key and answering the
> > prompts.
I'd like to merge this last line with the part above; what I meant by
this is that some people might not understand the ^key nomenclature.
(Again, not immediately obvious.) But most people, once trapped in an
editor, hit the escape key. In ee, that pops up a menu, one of which
items is an option to exit. So if nothing else, at least the new user
can get out of their editing session...
Mike Stone
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