Re: OT: mutt/nano spell checking
On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 10:44 AM, Jon Dowland
<jon+debian-user@alcopop.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 04:27:56PM -0400, Chris Jones wrote:
>> 'p' for 'paste' does strike me as rather more intuitive
>> than Ctrl-V.
>
> That all depends on your background. I use vi every day (I
> am a UNIX systems administrator); most of the time my vi is
> actually vim; but I wouldn't for a second recommend it to
> anyone who was not already familiar with the original vi (or
> any other modal editor: I can't name any others).
>
> Just about anyone who isn't an old-hand UNIX user will have
> some familiarity with a modeless editor and will have used
> an environment where CTRL+V is the key binding for 'paste',
> as it's been the default for over 10 years in GNOME, KDE,
> Mac OS, and Windows, to name but four.
>
> Nano is a perfectly fine, minimal-featured modeless editor.
> It was written as a F/OSS clone of 'pico', which is not DFSG
> free. It is considerably more intuitive and user friendly to
> the vast majority of people who are new to Debian or Linux
> (and thus are not already affiliated with any particular
> church or cult of $EDITOR). See
> <http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.1/faq.html#1.4> for more
> information.
^Z, ^X, ^C, and ^V were not chose for mnemonic value. They were
chosen for user convenience due to their physical placement on early
keyboards with only one crtl key. The idea was to make high-frequency
actions like undo, cut, copy, and paste very easy to type.
That mapping pre-dates the Macintosh. I think it came from Xerox PARC
where WIMP user interfaces were fist invented and implemented.
-- Lee
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