On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Andre Poenitz wrote: > On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 11:30:20AM +0100, Christian Ridderström wrote: > > For formulas, I want very fine-grained control of 'where' the cursor is, > > so the 2-cursor approach is useful, even if it sometimes feels like you > > are pressing the left/right arrows way to often. For normal text, I think > > I'd be annoyed if I had to do double 'left's just because I was crossing a > > markup border. > > But you'd cross markup borders less often than in math. If you can cope > with that in math (i.e. 'words' of typical length 1) you should be able to > handle that for phrease of lenght 10 or 20 or so as well. After all the > overhead in this case is just 10% or 5% of what you accept in math.
Umm.. actually, it might be even more annoying because it only happens now and then. In mathed, you get (sort of) used to it since it's so frequent. In textEd, I'd probably just get pissed off... With the ERT inset (in textEd) for instance, this is not really a problem since you have the visual "barrier" (box) that you pass through. > > > Some ideas out of the blue: > > * Have a "mode" setting that controls if movement is "course" or "fine" > > * Use modifier (e.g. M-Left/M-Right) for fine grained movement in 'textEd' > > M-Left/Right switches virtual screens here. No good. > SCNR ;-) I know you CNR, but I've changed that mapping to S-M-Left/Right (and use C-M-Left/Right to switch and bring the current application along). SCNR ;) > > > Mathed This would be great in mathed, unfortunately, you probably want > > -idea: M-Left/M-Right to do course movement there :-( Bah.. I'm > > stupid, why not change the behaviour of C-Left/C-Right.. at the > > moment these keys aren't so useful in mathed anyway. > > Because C-Left moves the mouse pointer half a screen to the left I > rarely test this feature... You need to fix your window manager? SCNR Seriously, what do you mean? Is it broken in 1.4? (in 1.3 it moves to the left/right-most position inside the math-inset IIRC) > > > > > But instead of starting a discussion on how to display insets in the > > > > most comfortable way > > > > How about modes for controlling if markup borders (i.e. insets?) should be > > shown, these could be: > > * Don't show any boxes etc > > * Only show box of the inset(s) that the cursor is in > > * Show all boxes > > I think the second point is sufficient and everything else not strictly > needed. For text editing, I'm pretty sure I'd like a mode without any boxes... it's annoying as it is with ERT boxes, index boxes etc, that clutter the screen and takes away my focus from the actual text content. Have you used word and NOT been irritated by the squiggly lines below words? (I'm not talking about the crappy grammar/vocabulary here) That said, I guess I'd have to actually try a lyx version where only the current word(s) that are e.g. emphasized appear in a "box" in order to see how annyoing it'd be. Note: Isn't it overkill drawing something that's emphasized using a box AND (e.g.) italics? We don't want to flood the user with visual info. > > > Some final thoughts: In mathEd, the 'where' is important -- is the > > cursor in a subscript, or in a superscript... objects are in a strict > > hierarchy. Is there a similar distiction in 'textEd'? > > The typical XML document structure is hierarical. So, yes. Sorry, I don't buy that argument. You are talking about data structures intended to be machine readable, whereas I am talking about how we (our brain) thinks about text. In my mind, text is more of a linear (sequential) object than something with the tree structure of a formula. > > > How about a figure float? > > Edited at it's 'anchor point' as it is right now. Works good enough and > fits into the hierarchy. No need to change. > > > No... that's not the same as a being in a subscript to me, since the > > subscript "belongs" to something. A footnote might belong to > > something though... > > Sure, to the word or phrase it is explaining, i.e. the 'anchor' > > > bah, this gets too complicated... > > Not really. A simple tree. I am still talking about how I think our brains associate objects and would prefer working with the text when we are in an "intuitive" phase, like when writing a lot. And for this case I'm not sure a (non-trivial) tree is the best metaphor. The tree is useful when we already have most of the text, and we for instance want to go in and emphasize a word. /Christian -- Christian Ridderström http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
