2 ms·
In principle maybe, but all present implementations fall a bit short. Why can't I use my mouse to position the cursor in any shell? Placing the cursor with th
by lupusreal 3y ago
In principle maybe, but all present implementations fall a bit short. Why can't I use my mouse to position the cursor in any shell? Placing the cursor with the mouse is something people commonly do in terminal editors like vim or emacs; the efficiency arguments against it fall flat because this is entirely optional and besides, many people use laptops with either a track-point directly in the middle of the home row keys or with a touchpad directly below the keyboard.
And there's no technical reason it couldn't be done; years ago I once did it as a proof of concept. It just hasn't made it into any major shell yet.. besides eshell anyway. It does work on eshell.
Anyway, it's not really a big deal, not important enough for me to pursue, but I do think it counts as a counterexample to disprove the "peak UX" claim. Command line interfaces in principle are great but in practice we're doing it by emulating hardware that went obsolete decades ago and piling cludges and hacks on top of that to make it feel a bit more modern.
Another example; there are a few ways to inline images in a terminal emulator but they're all kind of shit in their own ways; graphical thumbnails have clear utility when listing some directories; every serious file manager supports it but to do this in a terminal emulator is cludgy hacks.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoIt’s not done because there’s no use case. No point in writing anywhere and clobbering existing text.
- yaomtc 3y agoNonsense. Fixing a typo or amending a command somewhere in the middle are obvious use cases.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoThat’s only the last line, not quite what they stated. Still a lot slower than emacs or CUA keys, so no it doesn’t fall flat. The kind of person that would use it doesn’t use a terminal.
- lupusreal 3y ago> That’s only the last line, not quite what they stated Then I wasn't clear, I am talking about using the mouse to position the cursor in the current line being edited. If I am writing a long command and realize I made a typo 50 characters earlier in the second argument, I should be able to click in the second argument to reposition my cursor. And yes, I do use vi-mode and know how to do this the vi-way with just the keyboard, but Vim also supports using the mouse for this and there's no reason shells shouldn't as well. > The kind of person that would use it doesn’t use a terminal. Absolute nonsense.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoNonsense—a shell is not a full screen ncurses app like the others you've mentioned and probably wouldn't want it to be due to having to carry the scrollback buffer. You're the only person to implement this slower/problematic/nifty design in five decades, on a FLOSS operating system. Just a guess but maybe your attitude is also part of the problem.