From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Jul 15 10:37:03 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id KAA25795 for chat-outgoing; Mon, 15 Jul 1996 10:37:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu (Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.34]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA25785 for ; Mon, 15 Jul 1996 10:36:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jfieber@localhost) by Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id MAA05669; Mon, 15 Jul 1996 12:35:57 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu: jfieber owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 12:35:57 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber X-Sender: jfieber@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu To: Greg Lehey cc: FreeBSD Chat Subject: Re: icons (was: FreeBSD keyboard) In-Reply-To: <199607151123.NAA04607@allegro.lemis.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Mon, 15 Jul 1996, Greg Lehey wrote: > This may the case when the number of choices is small. When you > consider the number of key combinations which Emacs recognizes, menus > become very inefficient. I introduced my wife to Emacs just a few > weeks ago, showing her the menus at the top of the screen, but she > prefers to use the key combinations because it's easier than > navigating all the menus. A couple counterpoints: 1) It would be difficult to design menus worse than those that come with emacs. Xemacs is marginally better, but not a lot. What makes them difficult to navigate is that they are function oriented. Look around at easy to use menus and the common factor is not size, but a task oriented organization (which, regretably comes with a different set of limitations). 2) Are the control-shift-alt-meta-hyper-x r control-meta-b commands really that efficient? Bringing it back to keyboards, what about hand strain? Back when I was a regular emacs user, I actually unbound many of the cursor movement commands from alphabetic keys, forcing myself to use the keypad. It slowed me down a tiny bit, but my hands sure felt better. 3) Emacs has too many functions! ;-) It represents CISC architecture in its peak. I've been a long time emacs user, but have ditched for a "user friendly' RISC editor (nedit) and must say that there are very few features of emacs that I really miss (syntax highlighting, and psgml mode). (editor flames > /dev/null) -john == jfieber@indiana.edu =========================================== == http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================