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general intuitiveness and user-friendliness of GNU Info [was Re: Bug#785


From: Josip Rodin
Subject: general intuitiveness and user-friendliness of GNU Info [was Re: Bug#78504: info: Impossible to scroll just a single line]
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 21:25:53 +0100

On Sun, Dec 10, 2000 at 09:05:07AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > BTW one other problem I noticed with cross-references: stuff like *Note Some
> > long name that couldn't fit on the previous page:: doesn't work; the
> > cross-references don't span lines so pressing enter on any of the words in
> > the second line doesn't make anything happen.
> 
> Yes, this doesn't work in the stand-alone Info reader.  I will see if I 
> can fix that.

Please.

> [defensiveness skipped]

Hey, I didn't say anything bad about info :) I'm just telling you what's the
attitude of a large group of users I've talked to.

> In my opinion, basic browsing with Info is quite intuitive: you use the 
> normal cursor motion keys to navigate, you have SPC that goes through the 
> entire manual in the natural order, and you have TAB and RET to follow 
> cross-references.

That's one idea of intuitiveness and good interface.

You have to press the down arrow key up to 25 times to get it to scroll down
by a line. You have to use the left and right arrow keys up to 80 times to
get to a link (and then back to the bottom of the page to scroll). (No,
<tab> isn't very obvious, nor are ^A or ^E.) There's no convenient <Ins> and
<Del> two-line scrolling, like in lynx. There's no highlightning of links,
and you can't recognize "*Note:.*::" as being a hyperlink offhand, really.
Nothing except the bottom status line is highlighted, and there is no
colorized highlightning. The top status line can span lines which looks
somewhat confusing. The footnotes are displayed both in the bottom window
and at the end of the page in the top window. It's especially hard to read
anything in the top window when the bottom window (with the footnotes) takes
three quarters of the screen. When you press ? for help the bottom window
doesn't disappear.

That's just a part of the complaints I remember. With some I agree, for some
I don't care.

Anyway, most of the people who dislike info in the first five minutes won't
be using info long enough to file a bug report -- they'll just give up and
switch to a browser they feel is better. :/

-- 
Digital Electronic Being Intended for Assassination and Nullification



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