Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[excalamus]

May 28, 2020, 13:34 by kfogel@red-bean.com:

> On 28 May 2020, T.V Raman wrote:
> >emacs kbd commands -- and other well-designed ergonomic systems, eg
> >vi's h,j,k,l for navigation are better thought of as muscle
> >memory. The mnemonics are useful to learn, yes, but given the weird
> >layout of the qwerty keyboard,  rigidly sticking to mnemonics often
> >leads to non-ergonomic keybindings.
>
> Amen to what T.V. says here.
>
> Often, when people say that keybindings should be "intuitive", they mean 
> something like "there should be some connection between a plausible 
> English-language description of what the keybinding does and the letters 
> involved in the keybinding itself".
>
> But such language/key associations are only useful to newcomers anyway.  
> After all, there is nothing about the word "quit" that inherently suggests 
> its meaning -- it's just that those who have learned English have learned 
> what that word means.  Similarly, those who have learned the language of 
> Emacs know that C-g means the same thing (well, something very similar).
>
> Even independently of keyboard layout (mine is not QWERTY) this kind of 
> intuitiveness is of questionable value.  It *does* help newcomers somewhat, 
> but if used as an overriding principle it can result in an overly sparse 
> keybinding space or in problematic physical combinations like single-finger 
> hurdles.
>
> >So it's always a choice --- does one wish to create a system that is
> >"easy to learn" but painful to use, or one that "a little harder to
> >learn" with the benefit of being extremely efficient in the
> >long-run. I still think VI's nav keys are one of the best choices I've
> >seen from an ergonomics point of view, but completely "unintuitive"
> >for whatever "intuitive" means.
>
> Agreed.  Vi's default navigation keybindings are, frankly, better than Emacs' 
> (or at least they are on a QWERTY keyboard).  It also takes people a long 
> time to learn them.
>
> (I'm not suggesting Emacs change its default here: too many people have 
> learned the existing way, the efficiency gain is not so huge anyway, and 
> other bits of Emacs have been built around the assumptions of those default 
> navigational keybindings so there's no telling what full effects of such a 
> switch would be at this point.)
>
> Best regards,
> -Karl
>
Fair enough.  My thoughts were centered on how to explain to newcomers the 
use/benefits of 'C-g', especially within the manual.  I was curious what 
perspectives others have.

My understanding of the discussion prior to my interjection was that newcomers 
appear to misunderstand, are reluctant to use, or forget about 'C-g'.  I hope I 
didn't derail the convo into one of changing the physical location or the 
keybinding!  There's too much history to change 'C-g'.  For better or worse, 
it's what we have.