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


From: Josip Rodin
Subject: Re: general intuitiveness and user-friendliness of GNU Info [was Re: Bug#78504: info: Impossible to scroll just a single line]
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 13:43:47 +0100

On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 01:32:55PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > A quick inquiry among my fellow Debian developers showed that there's a bit
> > of discontent with info.
> 
> Nothing new here.  Several past discussions, including here, clearly
> show that at least some of the discontent is based on ignorance: there
> are several nifty features in Info that many users don't know about.
> I wonder how we should go about advertising them more, because I
> really think they are extremely useful; I myself use those features
> all the time.

They should definitely be more advertized.

[snipped all the info about the useful options]

Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to introduce a splash screen that the
new people would see? It would be turned off after one displaying because it
would begin to annoy people, of course, but on first use it wouldn't hurt.

Also, replacing "RET" with "Enter" on the help screen is likely to help
newbies, since most new users don't even know what a "Return" key is/was. :)
Listing that one and the `l' command before all others in the `Selecting
other nodes' section would be a good idea, too, because those seem like the
most used keys.

One other thing (talk about tangentialism... sorry, this thread has incited
me to investigate all the info quirks): the l command should return the
viewer at the position on the page he was at, not to the top of the page.

> > Additinally, what's the purpose of "Subfile: foo.info-2.gz" in the mode
> > line? It doesn't seem very useful to me...
> 
> Emacs emulation again, I presume.  We could turn it off by default and
> have an option to turn it on again, if that will help.  But what would
> we want to do with the real estate this frees on the mode line?

Put `Press ? for help.' there, of course! :)

> > > > If necessary to scroll it, that should be possible. Somehow :)
> > > 
> > > Exactly.  I expect users to have grave difficulties discovering the M-C-v 
> > > key.  I don't know what to do about that.
> > 
> > Indeed! Perhaps also bind it to Ctrl+Tab or something like that?
> 
> Something to take care of in the additional set of key bindings,
> perhaps?  How do other text-mode browsers handle scrolling the other
> window in the split-window configuration?

Pinfo seems to have all footnotes on the same page, not in another window.

Links, which supports HTML frames (the same idea as windows in info,
basically), treats each frame (window) the same, and you switch between them
using the TAB key...

> > > > > > When you press ? for help the bottom window doesn't disappear.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Why should it?
> > > > 
> > > > Because the footnote is off-topic, you want to read the help screen now 
> > > > that
> > > > you pressed ?.
> > > 
> > > How do we know that the user wants help for the main window, not for the 
> > > footnote?
> > 
> > Is the help screen for footnotes different from the one for the main window?
> 
> No, it's exactly the same.  But that's not what I meant.
> 
> What I meant to point out is that, when a user presses `?', she
> probably wants to find something that pertains to what she currently
> reads, and so what she reads should be still displayed for the user to
> consult while she reads the help (switching between buffers is another
> task that is not natural for anyone but Emacs users).  Since we don't
> know whether the user reads the main text or the footnote, we don't
> know which window to leave displayed and which one to close.

Why not close both of them and just display the help message? The user can
always use `l' to get back exactly where he was.

Also, when would anyone want to read the help screen and the text from a
document at the same time, how exactly could this help screen pertain to a
random info document?

-- 
Digital Electronic Being Intended for Assassination and Nullification



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