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Scrolling sounds like a terrible way to get around a file. I'd much rather be presented with a prompt to go to a named "section" with completion (an actual sect

Scrolling sounds like a terrible way to get around a file. I'd much rather be presented with a prompt to go to a named "section" with completion (an actual section in a prose document, or a function definition in a program), or to search for some text. Or, if I don't have a specific target in mind and I want an overview of the file, I prefer pagination to scrolling. But... I wonder how much my preference is conditioned by years of Emacs and its subpar scrolling? My preference for pagination+search extends to other software; to browsers, for example (spacebar or ctrl+f over mouse-wheel), but is that just a habit I got from my constant Emacs usage (I typed this comment in Emacs)?

dilap 7y ago
Exactly, it's hard to miss what you haven't had! In emacs, I mostly navigate around by searching, or sometimes by outlining (hide all lines that aren't a definition, move to definition, unhide). But I do remember before I became an emacs addict, and there was something very nice about having a physical sense of your file layout. If you have that sense, scrolling can an efficient way to navigate a file (well, up to a certain size, anyway). And I think there's something valuable in the almost subconscious feeling for the layout of the file you get as you scroll thru it. When I'm mostly in emacs, my sense of what a file "is" is much hazier, because I'm just warping from one place to another. (On the other hand, maybe the entire concept of a file as a linear progression is antiquated for source code...)