On Nov 14, 2006, at 5:34 AM, erik quanstrom wrote:
plus, are you really saying that if you don't want cursor keys, your just an old fortran programmer in plan 9 disguise?
Don't tell me you've never written a FORTRAN program that calls into curses :-) Although that's not as bad as having to debug one after the fact ...
Anyway ... my take is that "page up" says – quite explicitly – go up more than a line, whereas the keyboard arrow keys have had the entrenched behaviour of "move one character cell in the stated direction" for as long as we've had glass terminals. (The up-arrow vi vs. 3270 line-end column selection debate can take place else {where,when} :-)
Where is the research data that backs the claim that navigating via the mouse is more efficient than navigating via the keyboard? I know my own experience says this is nonsense. My physical context switch time between the keyboard and mouse is at least 300 ms; my fingers move quite a bit faster than that on the keyboard. I know that when I'm in one of the two modes – kbd vs. mouse – I'm very quick in that context. But as soon as I have to switch between them: yikes! To bounce back and forth from typing source code to repositioning a few lines via the mouse to typing again is horribly inefficient. And while I've come to grow and love acme over the last few months now that I use it regularly at work, that back-and-forth makes me want to hurl (only the keyboard and mouse, mostly, but there are days ...)
And chording on three-button mice that are really two-button+scroll- wheel is an exercise in carpal tunnel ... :-(
--lyndon
