[Texmacs-dev] Re: Patch #5494: Make selection behavior more standard conformant

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 09:56:15PM +0100, Norbert Nemec wrote:
> Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 09:24:06PM +0100, Norbert Nemec wrote:

>>> As it is, the patch will certainly not be liked by the emacs-fans among
>>> the TeXmacs users, as it changes the selection behavior - which is
>>> hardwired to something similar to emacs behavior - to a behavior more
>>> standard for modern editors.

>> And you sure push the buttons of the "emacs-fans" the wrong way by
>> implying it is not a "modern editor".

> Well - you may want to call it the best editor there ever was, but
> still, you have to admit that it is has its antique edges.

OK, I'll bite and rant.

If you mean that it is "old", well, yes it is. And it is a good
thing. In the same way that Unix is "old", the result of a long
evolution. It seems that writing software that doesn't (to my
judgement) unbearably suck takes decades of globally-mostly-positive
evolution. Emacs and Unix both suck a lot, but in their respective
niches (text editor and OS) I haven't found better yet.

 (As a sideline, in the end of the nineties, the evolution for MS
  Windows was negative as far as I was concerned. I was doing OK with
  Windows NT 4, but Windows 2000 was a huge step backwards as far as
  usability and documentation was concerned; that's what got me to try
  out GNU/Linux. In some way I should be thankful to Microsoft to have
  disgusted me so much I would go out and try something completely
  different, with a much steeper initial learning curve. Had they
  actually continued to improve their OS, I may actually never have
  tried out a Unix or Unix clone, or done so much later.)

As far as selection/copy/paste behaviour is concerned, I have used
both models (Emacs and MS Windows/KDE/Gnome) extensively and made a
choice of which one I prefer; I chose the Emacs one, not because I'm
more used to it. I was more used to the MS Windows one, seen
that... I had been a MS Windows user for years; only then I tried
Emacs. Running on MS Windows. And after a while I so much loved it (on
UI and technical grounds) that I switched to it as my text editor of
choice - under MS Windows. A negative point is that it should have a
keybinding for "copy" by default. That's about what I can think of.

The "newer" behaviour doesn't get browny points for being newer in my
eye. Quite the contrary. And in my life story, the Emacs behaviour is
the "new" one, because I started with the MS Windows behaviour. It
started with a penalty (for being different than what I was used to),
but still won.



The relevance of all this to discussing what TeXmacs should or should
not do? Very low, if any. Answers, if any, should probably go to
private mail; Mail-Followup-To set accordingly.

-- 
Lionel