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


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: general intuitiveness and user-friendliness of GNU Info [was Re: Bug#78504: info: Impossible to scroll just a single line]
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 09:12:21 +0200 (IST)

On Sun, 10 Dec 2000, Josip Rodin wrote:

> > [defensiveness skipped]

That's a strange way of encouraging volunteers to burn their after
hours on improving a program.

> Hey, I didn't say anything bad about info :)

Only that it looks like no one has tried to make it intuitive and easy
to use.

> You have to press the down arrow key up to 25 times to get it to scroll down
> by a line.

Sorry, I don't understand: Info doesn't let you scroll by a line at
all, unless you set scroll-step.  Did you mean by a page, perhaps?  If
so, PageDown should work, doesn't it?

In any case, I'd expect users to use PageDown and PageUp, not cursor
motion, for scrolling, if they are unhappy about SPC.

> 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.)

I thought TAB and BackTAB were widely used in all GUI programs to step
through all the ``interesting spots'', such as fields in a dialog.

What would you suggest as a more obvious way of getting to a link?

> There's no convenient <Ins> and <Del> two-line scrolling, like in
> lynx.

I never heard such a feature being suggested, and I don't use Lynx
myself.

However, DEL is already taken, it scrolls back a screenful...

Info is modeled after Emacs, as far as key bindings are concerned.  If
we want it to behave radically different, we will probably need a set
of entirely different key bindings, activated by a command-line
switch, like --vi-keys does.

> 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 color stuff is on my todo, but I don't know when I will have time
to add it.  Patches are most welcome.

> 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.

I'm not sure I understand what do you suggest as a remedy for these
problems.

> When you press ? for help the bottom window doesn't disappear.

Why should it?



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