4 ms·

Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era. Many of that trick does n

by xte 8y ago

Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era. Many of that trick does not have a purpose anymore but many still have, and not only for terminal usage but also for speed and comfort. The bad part IMO is the dichotomy between "younger" and "older" users, the former would benefit a lot from many "semi-forgotten techs" but the letter need to modernize and explain things a bit or at least advertise with proper demos. In Emacs world many things happen in this direction with newly precooked configs, new packages etc, same happen in shell land with zsh/fish and the recent "epidemic" new tool set that mostly add sugar to classic unix utilities, that's good but we need more and more. I dream a GuixSD with Emacs as a login shell on terminal and as default desktop with EXWM and a good looking default theme, a small org-based intro vitutor style at first startup, perhaps with few video demo and many, many more users may be enlightened :-)

rauhl 8y ago
> Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era. You’re right, but the way I like to put it is: I often use text rather than moving a mouse & clicking for the same reason that human beings often use speech rather than pointing & grunting (indeed, using a mouse is a lot like pointing & grunting at one’s computer). Using a smartphone & tablet really drive home how powerful it is to have a full-featured input device (i.e., a real keyboard), rather than just a mouse-driven UI.
- xte 8y ago
  Oh, I will steal (and credit of course) your "pointing & grunting" comparison :D thanks! On power I often leave some new colleagues astonished when they see how quick I am with Emacs vs with their "modern" solutions :-)
  - dotancohen 8y ago
    Wait until they see VIM!
    - xte 8y ago
      Ex-hardcore vimmer for more than a decade here :-) there is no comparison... Vim is a powerful and lightweight editor, Emacs is an operating systems people who do not know call it an editor. My demos are not about coding but MUA, slides (live in Emacs & exported in reveal.js/pdf with beamer), file management etc so not thing (n)vim do...
      - hsitz 8y ago
        No comparison? Well, I'd say there certainly is a comparison to be made. If you look at the plugins/packages available for Vim and Emacs you'll find that they're surprisingly comparable. For some niches Emacs has better packages, for some Vim has better plugin. Yes, Emacs has a better extension language. Yet somehow excellent plugins are still written in VimScript. And Vim has its own advantages. I say this as a former Vimmer who now mostly uses Emacs, mostly because of Org-mode. (Though I wouldn't use Emacs without Evil.) I did a lot of work on an Org-mode clone in Vim many years ago, which copied quite a few features and worked surprisingly well. Yes, it was somewhat hindered by limitations of Vim and VimScript. But the main problem was Org-mode had many years of head-start, and already had a large and active community of users, developers, and continual development, and there was simply no way for a resource-scarce, single-person project to catch up.
        xte 8y ago
        Oh, I do not intend to say that Vim is "inferior" or "bad", no intention to create religious flame, only that Vim was born and evolve as an editor, and do it's job pretty well. Emacs on contrary was born as a human-machine interface, like a DE, the ITS DE, that we can consider something like modern Lisp machines, or what we still have of them. We can compare editing capabilities of both and I think they are essentially on par, but we can't compare a car with a speedometer...
        hsitz 8y ago
        It is quite false to suggest comparison between Emacs and Vim is like comparing a "car to a speedometer". Vim is not just an editor, it is an "extensible-editor" in much the same way as Emacs is. I don't care if Emacs was born as a lisp machine, the fact is that the modern Vim-garden has as many add-on plugins and apps written for Vim as exist in Emacs' garden, possibly more. And in many cases the Vim extensions are better, despite being hobbled by an inferior extension language.
  - EdwardCoffin 8y ago
    Point-and-grunt as a derogatory term for GUIs has been around for decades [1] [1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/point-and-drool-interface.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/point-and-drool-interface....
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      "Real men don't use mice" was a common saying at that time.
      - xte 8y ago
        Not everywhere since Plan9 is really mouse-centric :-) However I think anyone have used both keyboard centric environment, at any level, and "modern mouse usage" can say that mouse sometimes is needed (like for image editing) but for plain UI is far less needed and often not really comfortable nor efficient at all... My only consideration is that our knowledge is mostly text, we have added video/images in the game but still text is by far predominant and mostly without any viable other option... So having a text-centric environment, without, of course, dropping graphics&c capabilities it's the most logic way of work...
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - lozf 8y ago
    > Oh, I will steal (and credit of course) your "pointing & grunting" comparison It's been around a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930607
- melling 8y ago
  it would be nice to look at a word and say select/delete/cap/rename etc.
  - xte 8y ago
    It's slower normally, even if we ever arrive at a substantial zero response time and 100% correct computer understatement it remain slower than act by hand with a powerful editor.
    - melling 8y ago
      I didn’t say it was always faster. You’re assuming that you’re always hunched over the computer with your hands on the keyboard. Often I’m in a relaxed position looking at the screen. We all agree that we spend more time reading code in writing? So, do you really want to be sitting at the computer with your hands on the keyboard at all times? You’re also assuming that you have a physical keyboard. In the 21st century billions of people use tablets and phones. Finally, I didn’t say you had to give up the keyboard. I said I would like to have the other option. You can still use AceJump.
      - xte 8y ago
        Well, for me a computer (desktop) is only marginally an entertainment device so I normally sit, with my "comfort" chair (Varier Balans) and my keyboard ready to operate... I have a smartphone, so I casually use touch input but mostly as a personal navigation device, a on-the-go mail reading device (I do not normally write mails on the go), a mobile phone for actually call or answer call GSM or VoIP and an org-mode limited display (Orgzly) for "to buy" grocery lists. Essentially no more. People who try to use such devices for more, like banking etc I simply call them poor, unfortunate and ignorant slaves. I do not find such devices as an innovation but as an involution and a failure, an involution because of their absurd limit, a failure because we are still unable to have a "computer on the go" when needed... It's not a matter of being "geek" but a matter of control our personal datas and environments and being able to produce contents, not only consume it. With mobile crap we can consume easily but we can't produce essentially nothing and we can't control our data. So they are absurd devices. BTW yes, I can still use my physical keyboard, unfortunately they are more and more bad, the sole acceptable remaining are super-expensive and still bad... I would love having again my beloved SUN type6 or ancient ones with many keys I can use with single key binding on Emacs. I would love to have programmable keyboard that are not immense amount of crap that demand super-buggy software only to register custom keys or macros and even with them they can't really be customized.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I go for the best of both worlds, mouse, clicking and keyboard shortcuts.
- chestervonwinch 8y ago
  OTOH pointing and grunting may be preferable in unfamiliar territory, e.g., at a restaurant where you can’t read the menu but pictures are provided.
  - enriquto 8y ago
    Sure, but in a professional setting, on your own work, it is completely unacceptable. Imagine if musicians did the same as computer scientists: all the keys, strings and holes in all the instruments would be labelled wit the note that they play. Difficult instruments like the clarinet would be rejected and deemed "obsolete" and non user-friendly. Young musicians would rally against the old musical notation, and would switch to a colored animated markup that only works inside new versions of ipads. That would be laughable, wouldn't it? Don't try to do the same with computers please. Learn the tools of your trade and master them. Do not fight against powerful tools because they need some training to use. Do not require "discoverability" for professional tools.
    - mkesper 8y ago
      Discoverability is a good thing, though! And one place where emacs is much better than others, too.
      - rbanffy 8y ago
        It's like you could open a clarinet and inspect the physics that make the sound in a clear, explicit written form.
      - enriquto 8y ago
        Discoverability is not bad in itself, only when it hinders other things, or when it becomes the main goal. Only toys have discoverability as a main feature.
Torwald 8y ago
> Many of that trick does not have a purpose anymore but many still have, and not only for terminal usage but also for speed and comfort. Only for comfort (and maybe ease of mind), not for speed. It was shown again and again that mousing s faster.

by xte 8y ago

rauhl 8y ago

> Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era. You’re right, but the way I like to put it is: I often use text rather than moving a mouse & clicking for the same reason that human beings often use speech rather than pointing & grunting (indeed, using a mouse is a lot like pointing & grunting at one’s computer). Using a smartphone & tablet really drive home how powerful it is to have a full-featured input device (i.e., a real keyboard), rather than just a mouse-driven UI.

xte 8y ago
Oh, I will steal (and credit of course) your "pointing & grunting" comparison :D thanks! On power I often leave some new colleagues astonished when they see how quick I am with Emacs vs with their "modern" solutions :-)
- dotancohen 8y ago
  Wait until they see VIM!
  - xte 8y ago
    Ex-hardcore vimmer for more than a decade here :-) there is no comparison... Vim is a powerful and lightweight editor, Emacs is an operating systems people who do not know call it an editor. My demos are not about coding but MUA, slides (live in Emacs & exported in reveal.js/pdf with beamer), file management etc so not thing (n)vim do...
    - hsitz 8y ago
      No comparison? Well, I'd say there certainly is a comparison to be made. If you look at the plugins/packages available for Vim and Emacs you'll find that they're surprisingly comparable. For some niches Emacs has better packages, for some Vim has better plugin. Yes, Emacs has a better extension language. Yet somehow excellent plugins are still written in VimScript. And Vim has its own advantages. I say this as a former Vimmer who now mostly uses Emacs, mostly because of Org-mode. (Though I wouldn't use Emacs without Evil.) I did a lot of work on an Org-mode clone in Vim many years ago, which copied quite a few features and worked surprisingly well. Yes, it was somewhat hindered by limitations of Vim and VimScript. But the main problem was Org-mode had many years of head-start, and already had a large and active community of users, developers, and continual development, and there was simply no way for a resource-scarce, single-person project to catch up.
      - xte 8y ago
        Oh, I do not intend to say that Vim is "inferior" or "bad", no intention to create religious flame, only that Vim was born and evolve as an editor, and do it's job pretty well. Emacs on contrary was born as a human-machine interface, like a DE, the ITS DE, that we can consider something like modern Lisp machines, or what we still have of them. We can compare editing capabilities of both and I think they are essentially on par, but we can't compare a car with a speedometer...
        hsitz 8y ago
        It is quite false to suggest comparison between Emacs and Vim is like comparing a "car to a speedometer". Vim is not just an editor, it is an "extensible-editor" in much the same way as Emacs is. I don't care if Emacs was born as a lisp machine, the fact is that the modern Vim-garden has as many add-on plugins and apps written for Vim as exist in Emacs' garden, possibly more. And in many cases the Vim extensions are better, despite being hobbled by an inferior extension language.
- EdwardCoffin 8y ago
  Point-and-grunt as a derogatory term for GUIs has been around for decades [1] [1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/point-and-drool-interface.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/point-and-drool-interface....
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    "Real men don't use mice" was a common saying at that time.
    - xte 8y ago
      Not everywhere since Plan9 is really mouse-centric :-) However I think anyone have used both keyboard centric environment, at any level, and "modern mouse usage" can say that mouse sometimes is needed (like for image editing) but for plain UI is far less needed and often not really comfortable nor efficient at all... My only consideration is that our knowledge is mostly text, we have added video/images in the game but still text is by far predominant and mostly without any viable other option... So having a text-centric environment, without, of course, dropping graphics&c capabilities it's the most logic way of work...
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- lozf 8y ago
  > Oh, I will steal (and credit of course) your "pointing & grunting" comparison It's been around a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930607
melling 8y ago
it would be nice to look at a word and say select/delete/cap/rename etc.
- xte 8y ago
  It's slower normally, even if we ever arrive at a substantial zero response time and 100% correct computer understatement it remain slower than act by hand with a powerful editor.
  - melling 8y ago
    I didn’t say it was always faster. You’re assuming that you’re always hunched over the computer with your hands on the keyboard. Often I’m in a relaxed position looking at the screen. We all agree that we spend more time reading code in writing? So, do you really want to be sitting at the computer with your hands on the keyboard at all times? You’re also assuming that you have a physical keyboard. In the 21st century billions of people use tablets and phones. Finally, I didn’t say you had to give up the keyboard. I said I would like to have the other option. You can still use AceJump.
    - xte 8y ago
      Well, for me a computer (desktop) is only marginally an entertainment device so I normally sit, with my "comfort" chair (Varier Balans) and my keyboard ready to operate... I have a smartphone, so I casually use touch input but mostly as a personal navigation device, a on-the-go mail reading device (I do not normally write mails on the go), a mobile phone for actually call or answer call GSM or VoIP and an org-mode limited display (Orgzly) for "to buy" grocery lists. Essentially no more. People who try to use such devices for more, like banking etc I simply call them poor, unfortunate and ignorant slaves. I do not find such devices as an innovation but as an involution and a failure, an involution because of their absurd limit, a failure because we are still unable to have a "computer on the go" when needed... It's not a matter of being "geek" but a matter of control our personal datas and environments and being able to produce contents, not only consume it. With mobile crap we can consume easily but we can't produce essentially nothing and we can't control our data. So they are absurd devices. BTW yes, I can still use my physical keyboard, unfortunately they are more and more bad, the sole acceptable remaining are super-expensive and still bad... I would love having again my beloved SUN type6 or ancient ones with many keys I can use with single key binding on Emacs. I would love to have programmable keyboard that are not immense amount of crap that demand super-buggy software only to register custom keys or macros and even with them they can't really be customized.
pjmlp 8y ago
I go for the best of both worlds, mouse, clicking and keyboard shortcuts.
chestervonwinch 8y ago
OTOH pointing and grunting may be preferable in unfamiliar territory, e.g., at a restaurant where you can’t read the menu but pictures are provided.
- enriquto 8y ago
  Sure, but in a professional setting, on your own work, it is completely unacceptable. Imagine if musicians did the same as computer scientists: all the keys, strings and holes in all the instruments would be labelled wit the note that they play. Difficult instruments like the clarinet would be rejected and deemed "obsolete" and non user-friendly. Young musicians would rally against the old musical notation, and would switch to a colored animated markup that only works inside new versions of ipads. That would be laughable, wouldn't it? Don't try to do the same with computers please. Learn the tools of your trade and master them. Do not fight against powerful tools because they need some training to use. Do not require "discoverability" for professional tools.
  - mkesper 8y ago
    Discoverability is a good thing, though! And one place where emacs is much better than others, too.
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      It's like you could open a clarinet and inspect the physics that make the sound in a clear, explicit written form.
    - enriquto 8y ago
      Discoverability is not bad in itself, only when it hinders other things, or when it becomes the main goal. Only toys have discoverability as a main feature.

Torwald 8y ago

> Many of that trick does not have a purpose anymore but many still have, and not only for terminal usage but also for speed and comfort. Only for comfort (and maybe ease of mind), not for speed. It was shown again and again that mousing s faster.