dselect and customizable key bindings

[Panu Hällfors <panupa@iki.fi>]

On Sun, Aug 01, 1999 at 09:37:37PM +0900, sen_ml@eccosys.com wrote:
> this point has probably been raised before, but if a user has a vi or
> emacs like background, i'm sure they would appreciate having
> keybindings that are much more similar to that

The only action both a text editor and dselect have is scrolling a
window. And since dselect already has two windows to scroll one
just can't always use the same keys. There must always be at least
two keys that tell a window to scoll up and another two to tell
it to scroll down.
Or am I missing something?

(about learning the key bindings over and over again)
> i'm not sure i follow what you mean here.

Oh, it's nothing. I'm hardly sure myself. :)

> > Just imagine a newbie calling his guru accross the street and the
> > guru coming to fix the newbie's installation - with different key
> > bindings than in the guru's own dselect!
> 
> uh, well, i think a sensible implementation would allow one to use the
> default keybindings

Of course. And then we could implement customizable look&feel and
even an option to print all the letters upside down! You never know
what people might prefer. In this case, too,  it's no problem if a
user has his dselect looking like a shopping trolley with letters
upside down: we can always use the --default switch.

> am i missing what you mean?

I mean the KISS principal.

This all boils down to the question what we want Debian to be:
 -MS Windows is popular and easy to use because you have the same
  simple UI everywhere. It makes the user act the way it wants.
 -Debian is nice to maintain because it allows you to be the
  one in command, the system is not trying to be smarter than you.

Now, of course the "heart" or Debian must be fully configurable
but don't we want the first steps (installation) to be as simple
as possible? As my friend always says about software developement:
"Consider the user as stupid as a log. Or even a little more stupid."

You may think that "But the customization is meant for the
experts". Believe me - even a dog-size warning in the customization
section wouldn't prevent some newbies from messing up their
dselect and then complaining that Debian is so difficult system...

So to conclude:
If the keybindings are to be customizable, at least be sure to
hide the configuration very well!

     Panu 

-- 
   Panu Hällfors, panupa@iki.fi
    http://www.iki.fi/panupa/