Re: [Nano-devel] patch for navigation in view mode

[Chris Allegetta]

I like the intent here, but there are some philosophical ideas here  
that it contradicts:

-The view mode in nano (inherited from Pico) is I think purposely not  
toggle-able during the edit session. I believe it has historically  
been used to give someone with restricted access a read only copy of a  
file.  The obvious counter argument here is of course that the right  
way to handle such a situation is with file permissions, and I would  
guess the original usage was more common with Freenet or BBS systems.   
Also, I honestly have never ever even used view mode, as it's useless  
to me in that capacity in it's current form (see below for why).

- hard coding these values into the code is a no-no given the new key  
binding code.  I could envision some new menu type called 'view' that  
would be used to populate the main shortcut list when in view mode.   
This way other keystrokes that are already claimed by nano in normal  
operation (e.g. ^f and ^b) could be rebound to function as expected.

-To be really useful as a pager, nano should unction like one when  
reading from a pipe instead of a file.  I've tried unsuccesfully to  
add this functionality in the past, but stabilizing the code base  
after adding undo/redo has been consuming all my free time, even  
though this functionality would be a huge win.

In short I can''t accept this patch in its current form, but I think  
the idea warrants further investigation and discussion.

--
Chris A

On Oct 16, 2008, at 2:04 PM, Jason DeVita <address@hidden>  
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've made a patch to allow vi/less style navigation while in view- 
> mode, and also to toggle between view and edit modes.  Basically,  
> Mod-1 toggles view-mode.  And when in view-mode, you can use h-j-k-l  
> to move the cursor, 'b' and <space> to page up/down, '/' to search,  
> n/N to find next/previous match, g/G to goto start/end of the  
> document, and 'q' to quit.  I find it much faster to use these when  
> I'm mostly navigating, and not doing much editing.
>
> I'm not much of an applications programmer (I normally write  
> numerical/scientific stuff), so I don't know if what I did is wrong  
> or bad.  But it seems to work for me.  The patch is on the svn tip  
> (as of today).
>
> Regards,
> Jason
> <view_nav.patch>
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