::scr Editors. Again.

[Piers Cawley]

Earle Martin <scr@downlode.org> writes:

> On Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 08:09:38AM -0800, celia romaniuk wrote:
>> I have a feeling that people tend to prefer using tools that
>> require the least possible disruption of their general usage
>> patterns, simply because they can then spend less time thinking
>> about how they're going to do something, and more time just doing
>> it. So if people are using command-line environments all the time,
>> then apps which let them stick to that environment will be more
>> appealing.
> 
> One of the strong features MacOS apps - at least, well-written
> ones[0] - is that almost every menu item will have its own special
> shortcut, allowing power users, if there can be such a thing on a
> Mac, to perform software operations by dint of keyboard only, or as
> close as they can get to it, whilst everyone else can continue to
> Carry On Clicking (starring Sid James as the randy web designer).
> Most of the basic actions will be, or should be, the same in all
> programs, for example Command-O to bring up the Open File dialog
> box. I think this dual quality is very desirable as it avoids the
> heap-of-keystrokes learning curve problem and also avoids forcing
> you to use the mouse all the time.

Once upon a time, when the world was young and people still thought
desktop publishing was a really neat idea (some time between digital
watches and micro scooters I think), my favourite editor in the world,
ever! was Quark XPress on the mac. It was a joy and a pleasure to use.
You'd start of doing all the clicky pasty stuff, and then you'd start
to notice that all those little status bars would also accept inputs.
So you could just nudge that textbox over to the left by 6 points by
going to the box and sticking + 6pt after whatever the current value
was. It didn't matter that you were moving stuff around in points and
the box defaulted to metric (though that was easily fixable...), It
Just Worked.

And this sort of thing worked throughout the program. As you got
deeper and deeper into it (and only if you wanted to, there were
people who did great work without knowing all the short cuts. Though
they did tend to boggle slightly when I went to work -- the 'hands
never leaving the keyboard' approach was just so damned *fast*) almost
that you might want to do from the keyboard could be done from the
keyboard. It was great. Who knows, maybe it still is, though Quark
seem to be going out of their way to piss people off. And Adobe
InDesign is looking *really* nice, and appears to piss all over Quark
typographically. 

The thing is, that the same program which allowed experienced
operators to be phenomenally productive also enabled the dilettante to
produce good work (just remember the cardinal rule children, never use
more than three fonts in a document, and *never* use more than one
basic font in body copy (strictly, bold, italic, etc are seperate
fonts but we'll let that slide shall we) and you should be okay...),
and it also catered to the designers who were visual baby and didn't
really like getting their fingers on the nasty keyboard. That
interface was *DEEP*.

And I think it's depth of interface that I really rate in a tool.
PhotoShop is great for similar reasons. I don't pretend to be a really
hot PhotoShop jockey, I can make it do what I want for my needs, and
it does it really well, but watching an experienced operator driving
it can be awe inspiring. Depth of interface again. You can rave all
you like about the Gimp, and it's a very nice toy, but it really is
only a toy when you sit it next to PhotoShop. PhotoShop just does so
*much* and it does it without any great fuss and without requiring to
learn scads of new stuff before you can get anything out of it.

So, I guess you'll not be surprised to discover that I use Xemacs as my
day to day editor. Again, it's 'deep', though it doesn't have the same
initial approachability as the other tools I mentioned, it allows me
to do almost anything. As you probably know, I'm working on a
refactoring tool for Perl programs. My initial thought was to write
some whizzy GUI for it with Tk or GTK or whatever, but on further
reflection, I realise that I'm going to be doing it in Xemacs because
it's got the editor side of things down and because having a
refactoring browser available in that environment means that I'll have
it available to me in the tool I use every day; I won't have to switch
in and out of different applications. And, of course, Xemacs provides
me with the tools I need to *implement* the gui side of things. And
lisp is a fun language to hack in occasionally.

-- 
Piers

   "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in
    possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite."
         -- Jane Austen?