m ike wrote:
On the subject of liking and hating things, one thing I hate about html
(and several others, including man (but *not* info)) is how page-down
works when you hit the last page. In man, most of the time that I hit
page-down, I resume reading at the very top line (very consistent) until
the last page comes up. The bottom of the text does a hard stop at the
bottom of the screen giving me whiplash of the brain. At this point, I
have to tell the reading center of my brain "Ahem! Experiencing
technical difficulties. Please stand by while I scan the page for the
last words I was reading. Once I find them, I will back up to the
beginning of the thought that was so brutally interrupted and restart
reading from that point. Please stand by. I'm sure I will find that
stupid text I was just reading any moment now. Please stand by. ...
... ... Erm, what was I just reading? Crap!!~! Please stand by
while I go back to the top of the man page, hit page down until I find
myself back to where I was before I hit that infernally stoopid
page-down button. Please stand by. Almost there. Almost there. Hey,
this damn page is a lot longer than I thought it was. Shit, I'm nowhere
near the end yet. Please stand by. Please stand by. Aah, I think
we're here. Damn. False alarm. Please stand by. Please stand...
SHIT!!! I hit the damned end again. Here we go again." (Yes, I'm
exagerating the process, but not the emotions.) Why the hell can't all
pagers (including html) remain consistent between ALL pages, including
the last one!?! I think all html pages should have as their last line
"No more after this." and followed by about a hundred newlines. Same
goes for all man pages (either that or change the default-installation
page-down-default to mimick ESC-spacebar.)
before advancing, highlight (double-click) a word at or near the
bottom of the page
An inconvenient workaround. I have a few of those, but that one is
worth trying to remember when in things like man.
I wish I could take man, mozilla, and many others, and make them default
to paging down a little more like the way vi does it. When vi hits the
bottom, you know it because of all the blank lines at the bottom which
each begin with ~ .
What I do not like about the way vi does a page down is that the two
lines it moves from the bottom of the screen to the top are two full
lines as delineated by line feed characters. As the person who is
reading what is displayed, I don't care about where the line breaks are
and cannot tell by looking. By default, vi does not show the line break
characters, nor do I want it to. I would like to be able to get into
the habit of hitting [Page Down] and picking up my reading in the
normal-person-predictable place. I would like to make vi, at the bottom
of a screen when it has a "line" too long to fit in the remaining screen
lines, to go ahead and display as many screen lines of it as it can and
make the last one "@..." to indicate that it has already displayed as
much as it can and that the rest won't fit. "@" would still be used in
the case where none of the "line" is displayed. And I would also like
to make vi, when hitting [Page Down], to just carry the last two
*screen* lines to the top (and for clarification, this does not include
"@..." nor "@"). I sometimes wish I knew C enough to hack such changes
(though such changes probably would have few who would appreciate
them). But as it is, I can just barely feel my way blindly through vi
as a user. Who knows, vi is so powerful it probably has the ability
already and just needs the default to be set that way.
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