Re: Emacs learning curve

[Uday S Reddy]

On 7/14/2010 7:05 PM, Drew Adams wrote:


> Dragging is a kind of scrolling.

If you say so!

But you have a useful idea there.  If we make aliases drag-up and drag-down for 
scroll-up and scroll-down, I suppose everybody can be happy.

> The point is that both points of view can be useful and both are used. The
> wikipedia page for Scrolling refers to both in its very first paragraph:

I suppose you have clearly made the point that "scrolling" is not precise 
enough a word to hang our coats on.  It is better to focus on "up" and "down" 
and see if they are human-centered.  According to you, the human user 
identifies with the document being edited and, therefore, scrolling "up" feels 
perfectly natural for moving up.  I think you would be in a minority if you 
think this way.  It feels strange to most of us.

For the vast majority of Emacs users, these names don't matter an inch because 
they use the key bindings.  Neither for me.  But, when I started using speech 
recognition, I had to vocalize the commands, and I really couldn't bring myself 
to say "scroll up" when I wanted to move down the document.  So, I defined a 
voice command "page down" for scroll-up and, when I found it hard on my voice, 
just called it "scroll down".

Cheers,
Uday