On Mon, Mar 20, 2000 at 04:46:04AM -0300, Nicol?s Lichtmaier wrote:
>
> It's a tough issue, but there's certainly a line somewhere. And mutt does
> not have reasonable defaults. In the keyboard, each key has a function,
I (along with others) dispute that the defaults are not
reasonable. Out of curiosity, I moved my .muttrc out of the way so I
could examine the native keybindings.
> there are lots of functions that are not directly in the keyboard, that's
> why each program has to invent a keybinding. But there are functions that
> *are* in the keyboard and so:
>
> PgUp - must scroll up a page, just that.
> PgDown - must scroll down a page
This is in fact what it does. If no further information can be
displayed, PgDown has the added effect of moving to the next message
(that PgUp doesn't do the same is a little odd, though). If the added
functionality of PgDown bothers you, set pager_stop.
The odd thing is, I remember having to get used to PgDown going
down a page in the current message. For a while, I must have been
using a mail or news reader that had PgDown linked to Next Message and
PgUp linked to Previous message, and I had gotten used to the concept
of a message being a single "page" that simply couldn't be fit on the
screen.
> Up Arrow - must scroll up a line
> Up Arrow - must scroll down a line
In what context? The arrows *do* scroll up and down one line...
in the index. They simply retain this behaviour even when viewing a
message text.
> Home - must go to the start of something
> End - must go to the end of something
Again, mutt does exactly this on my system without rebinding
anything. Home goes to the beginning of a viewed message, End goes to
the end.
> Using the Space and the Backspace keys for up and down movement is absurd,
> it's even stupid. Backspace is back-space. Those keybindings where thought
> for keyboards without arrows, and those keyboards no longer exists...
Or for terminals without valid cursor-key translations, and those
terminals and connections DO exist. Or for people who don't want to
have their hands leave the home position, and those people DO exist.
I almost exclusively use the spacebar to page down, and I sometimes
use backspace to page backwards. Different != stupid, and I'd point
out that your attitude is probably offending people by now.
> Besides, configuration should always target the norma-naive user. The tough
> user can always edit a configfile.
From my experiments with the above, only two things behave in a
way that I would expect an unfamiliar user to find strange: asymmetry
in PgUp/PgDown behaviour, and maybe UpArrow and DownArrow moving
between messages instead of up and down single lines in a viewed
message. That can be fixed with three lines:
set pager_stop
bind pager <up> previous-line
bind pager <down> next-line
If you change these three settings, you will almost certainly
confuse a number of normal users who have used mutt before and have
come to learn those keybindings as "normal". So pick your target of
confusion: people who have not yet used the program, or people who
have. Since you're not the person who is going to be fielding bug
reports of "Page Down is suddenly broken, it doesn't go to the next
message anymore" or "Why did the arrow keys suddenly change behaviour,
how do I get it to go back to the way it was", I find your vehemence
somewhat out of place.
On the other hand, maybe the project really would find those three
lines more convenient to have as defaults. How about it, folks,
anyone in favor of adding the three lines above to the default
/etc/Muttrc?
--
Zed Pobre <zed@debian.org> a.k.a. Zed Pobre <zed@resonant.org>
PGP key and fingerprint available on finger; encrypted mail welcomed.
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