Oleg Kobchenko wrote: > What Don just described is rightful expectation mindset of > a user from experience with how programs work in modern-day GUI. > Although the GUI of present word processors, email clients, etc. > is considered *modeless* as opposed to earlier programs like vi, > there are tiny almost unnoticible "modes" such as selection, > (to cut and paste), dialog boxes, dragging, modal tool buttons, > which all have in common that they deviate from a normal > state of the application. To return to the initial state, the user > needs to "escape" it, hence the Esc key is used for that purpose. > Escaping a mode to return to main view is distinctly different > from *exiting* the application. With saturation of document-based > interfaces (text documents, Web pages, etc) the same true for > a document: escaping a mode is different from *closing* the > document window. > > I have the same mismatch experience when using the Find dialog > and pressing Esc to try to dismiss it instead closes the script > window, which is a document window for J. > (in script) Ctrl+F, type, Enter, Esc -- closes script
The last problem is a rather unfortunate behaviour of Find. When a search is done, the found text is highlighted. In order to preserve the highlight, the script window is set in focus - otherwise, if the Find dialog were in focus, the highlight would disappear. Now with the script window in focus, pressing Esc will close the script window. There is no obvious remedy with the current system, but I hope to fix this sometime. Apart from this, the use of Esc to close a window seems reasonable to me, even if non-standard - work in progress should never be lost. Perhaps we should have another configuration option that determines whether Esc can be used to close a window? As regards Esc closing the J application, by default this is done with a prompt. All we have done is provide a configuration option to allow the user to bypass the prompt if they wish. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
