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Or, in short, you want everything to run in an emacs interface. The world has moved on. We have mice now. Sorry. Google implemented keyboard navigation in their

Or, in short, you want everything to run in an emacs interface. The world has moved on. We have mice now. Sorry. Google implemented keyboard navigation in their search results and apparently the uptake has not been great. CPUs are there to be "wasted". You pay for that clock frequency to use it and make your life better. Most people don't want to do everything in a terminal. It's depressing.

rjaco31 11y ago
Google hijacking the keyboard to only be able to navigate through their search results instead of letting the user scroll the page with keyboard as usual is indeed pretty annoying imho..
mbrock 11y ago
We had mice for a brief instant of computer history, then came the phones and tablets and e-readers and watches and TVs and voice interfaces and who knows what's next? I worked on a web-based replacement for medical record software, and a primary complaint from users was that they wanted to be able to use the keyboard. These weren't Unix nerds or whatever, they were normal people who wanted to get stuff done effectively and ergonomically. Nobody knows you can do keyboard navigation on Google, and anyhow that's just one website with a special custom JavaScript. Why keyboard navigation on the web is so horrible and embarrassing is an interesting question with lots of strands to investigate. Why would CPUs be there to be wasted? Power efficiency is even an ethical imperative these days. If there are more efficient ways to do the basic tasks of computing and networking, that also allows CPUs to do more interesting and valuable things. It's not about Emacs, that's just my personal idiosyncratic preference. Other people have other preferences, which is exactly the point. Note that Emacs works very well with many network standards, like email, Usenet, IRC, RSS, even BitTorrent. These are protocols that have enough semantic structure, openness, and simplicity to allow access with different clients that present the information in whatever way is optimal for the user. As for most people not wanting to use terminals, how do you know? Maybe they just don't like the existing terminal interfaces. Unix commands are notoriously cryptic and shells don't help much. But if you showed a normal person a nice-looking shell where you could type "netflix breaking bad s3" and get a nice presentation back, would they really be depressed?
hollerith 11y ago
Lots of people including myself make heavy use of the mouse in Emacs. And pretty much the only time I use a terminal these years is to recover from having inadvertently messed up my .emacs file. In fact, in at least one way, Emacs has better mouse support than either Firefox or Chrome do, at least on OS X: in Firefox or Chrome, even when the browser's window is right up against the right edge of the screen, the rightmost column of pixels does not belong to the browser's scroll bar, which makes it hard to interact with the scroll bar, particularly since OS X 10.7 or 10.8 when scroll bars got thinner. In contrast, in a properly-designed OS X app, like TextEdit or TextMate, whenever the right edge of the app's window is up against the right edge of the screen, the user can just jam the mouse cursor to the right and start interacting with the scroll bar without the need to get the cursor into a thin target region. Now most Macs these days come with trackpads, and the problem I just described doesn't apply to users who scroll by using (two fingers on) the trackpad, but if the Mac is a desktop Mac (i.e., not a MacBook) and the user prefers a mouse to an external trackpad, this is an important issue. Emacs, particularly the Mitsuharu version of Emacs (which everyone who uses Emacs with a pointing device on OS X should be using because the FSF version often has bugs that affect Emacs's integration with OS X's graphical subsystems) gets this "rightmost column of pixels" issue right. (Sublime Text and Atom are 2 more apps that do not get it right.) So in summary, although Emacs looks like an ncurses- or terminal-interface app and not a native GUI-based app and although many Emacs users are vocal pointing-device skeptics, not all Emacs users are mouse-haters, and Emacs actually has very good support for pointing devices.
RogerL 11y ago
As the author notes, Emacs was an example. The browser interface is terrible. We use bug tracking software. JIRA. It's horrible. Click here, click there, this screen closes, that one opens, this thing is over here. Ugh. It is just a click fest. For this sort of thing I want an MDI interface. I read a report - it sounds like one a duplicate. I want to search for it. I want to go to a search window, do the search, and compare them side by side. Or I want to look at the backlog and the current sprint. Sure, to an extent I can open multiple browser windows or tabs, etc. This is another example. - one windows for everything you are trying to do is often cumbersome and terrible. You are forcing UI design on me, the user, every. frigging. time. I. use. your. app. I don't want to open 5 tabs to the same site, maneuver them around, deal with "going back requires page resubmission" warnings, let alone deal with sites that don't understand my 5 tabs are all one session in my mind. Don't make the user solve that problem every day they use your product.

rjaco31 11y ago

Google hijacking the keyboard to only be able to navigate through their search results instead of letting the user scroll the page with keyboard as usual is indeed pretty annoying imho..

mbrock 11y ago

We had mice for a brief instant of computer history, then came the phones and tablets and e-readers and watches and TVs and voice interfaces and who knows what's next? I worked on a web-based replacement for medical record software, and a primary complaint from users was that they wanted to be able to use the keyboard. These weren't Unix nerds or whatever, they were normal people who wanted to get stuff done effectively and ergonomically. Nobody knows you can do keyboard navigation on Google, and anyhow that's just one website with a special custom JavaScript. Why keyboard navigation on the web is so horrible and embarrassing is an interesting question with lots of strands to investigate. Why would CPUs be there to be wasted? Power efficiency is even an ethical imperative these days. If there are more efficient ways to do the basic tasks of computing and networking, that also allows CPUs to do more interesting and valuable things. It's not about Emacs, that's just my personal idiosyncratic preference. Other people have other preferences, which is exactly the point. Note that Emacs works very well with many network standards, like email, Usenet, IRC, RSS, even BitTorrent. These are protocols that have enough semantic structure, openness, and simplicity to allow access with different clients that present the information in whatever way is optimal for the user. As for most people not wanting to use terminals, how do you know? Maybe they just don't like the existing terminal interfaces. Unix commands are notoriously cryptic and shells don't help much. But if you showed a normal person a nice-looking shell where you could type "netflix breaking bad s3" and get a nice presentation back, would they really be depressed?

hollerith 11y ago

Lots of people including myself make heavy use of the mouse in Emacs. And pretty much the only time I use a terminal these years is to recover from having inadvertently messed up my .emacs file. In fact, in at least one way, Emacs has better mouse support than either Firefox or Chrome do, at least on OS X: in Firefox or Chrome, even when the browser's window is right up against the right edge of the screen, the rightmost column of pixels does not belong to the browser's scroll bar, which makes it hard to interact with the scroll bar, particularly since OS X 10.7 or 10.8 when scroll bars got thinner. In contrast, in a properly-designed OS X app, like TextEdit or TextMate, whenever the right edge of the app's window is up against the right edge of the screen, the user can just jam the mouse cursor to the right and start interacting with the scroll bar without the need to get the cursor into a thin target region. Now most Macs these days come with trackpads, and the problem I just described doesn't apply to users who scroll by using (two fingers on) the trackpad, but if the Mac is a desktop Mac (i.e., not a MacBook) and the user prefers a mouse to an external trackpad, this is an important issue. Emacs, particularly the Mitsuharu version of Emacs (which everyone who uses Emacs with a pointing device on OS X should be using because the FSF version often has bugs that affect Emacs's integration with OS X's graphical subsystems) gets this "rightmost column of pixels" issue right. (Sublime Text and Atom are 2 more apps that do not get it right.) So in summary, although Emacs looks like an ncurses- or terminal-interface app and not a native GUI-based app and although many Emacs users are vocal pointing-device skeptics, not all Emacs users are mouse-haters, and Emacs actually has very good support for pointing devices.

RogerL 11y ago

As the author notes, Emacs was an example. The browser interface is terrible. We use bug tracking software. JIRA. It's horrible. Click here, click there, this screen closes, that one opens, this thing is over here. Ugh. It is just a click fest. For this sort of thing I want an MDI interface. I read a report - it sounds like one a duplicate. I want to search for it. I want to go to a search window, do the search, and compare them side by side. Or I want to look at the backlog and the current sprint. Sure, to an extent I can open multiple browser windows or tabs, etc. This is another example. - one windows for everything you are trying to do is often cumbersome and terrible. You are forcing UI design on me, the user, every. frigging. time. I. use. your. app. I don't want to open 5 tabs to the same site, maneuver them around, deal with "going back requires page resubmission" warnings, let alone deal with sites that don't understand my 5 tabs are all one session in my mind. Don't make the user solve that problem every day they use your product.