Re: [Help-nano] getting nicely justified comments in an easy way

[Seb]

Hi Benno,


> Ah.  I forgot to say that it needs --autoindent in order to work.

Ah, yes, I should have seen this, sorry. It works!

> Hmmm...  Okay, I will bring back ^W^Y and ^W^V, as "blind keys":
> they will not be listed in the help lines nor in the help text,
> but they will work.  See attached patch.

This is an excellent compromise.
This patch works too.

> > ^U no longer undoes ^J, I have to use M-U.
> Yes, the change of meaning of ^U right after a justification was an 
> anomaly.  I don't want to keep it for the sake of long-time users 
> because it might surprise and frustrate newer users.

I see your point. Perhaps it feels more natural to Perl enthusiasts to 
vary meaning with context--just like we do in natural speech.

> Clean code and esthetics were not a consideration in removing ^Y and ^V 
> from the WhereIs menu, but the simple fact that those keystrokes don't 
> make sense there: they are not about searching but about jumping: so 
> they should be (and are) in the GotoLine menu.

That's what I call aesthetics.

You've made my day with the patch, so I'm happy and I'll switch to 4.0 .
I feel it might be useful to say a few more words about ^W^Y though.

* Searching for a string in a file implies navigating the file. ^Y is a
  nickname for "top of the file". So ^W^Y is not totally from cuckooland.
  It's more like another way of interpreting what searching means.

* Straightening out the interface makes sense, but please don't forget
  that you're affecting the daily lives of your users. When I'm deep in
  thought writing a program, my fingers know what they have to do to get
  me to the part I'm thinking about. If it suddenly doesn't work, my whole
  train of thought is lost. That's bad. I start cursing the developers and
  the program slips even further from me.

* At the end of the day, to whom does the software belong? I'm not
  thinking like a lawyer here, about GPL and all. There is a tacit, moral
  contract between users and developers. Users trust developers to
  make their daily tool more and more useful while keeping it familiar.
  Asking users to change their habits because they don't make sense in
  your eye is not a winning proposition. Users feel betrayed and
  belittled. Emotions kick in. It's a recipe for brewing shitstorms.


I filed two requests on Savannah.


Kind regards,
Sébastien.