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

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Seb,

Op 30-03-19 om 23:23 schreef Seb:
> Thanks for the patch. I did
>     cd src && patch chars.c 00*.patch
> then recompiled and reinstalled nano, but it doesn't work.

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

> I see on Savannah that ^W^Y and ^W^V are no longer supported. ^Home and ^End 
> are
> more logical, but they take the hands away from the center of the keyboard. 
> Esc-/
> and Esc-\ do work, but so far I used the Esc key for switches: long lines,
> autoindent, softwrapping now. It doesn't feel right to use it to navigate the
> file. ^+Shift+Y/V would have made more sense.

Control+Shift+letter always gives the same code as Control+letter --
under ncurses those keystrokes are indistinguishable.

> I wonder if the upsides to the code
> of eliminating ^W^Y really outweighs breaking compatibility with the 
> entrenched
> habits of millions of users. There is no --oldskool option. And it's marked on
> Savannah as "Won't fix". I have been using ^W^Y for 24 years. Switching to
> nano-4.0 would be a pain for weeks, for no obvious upside.

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.

But... millions of users?  :)  Of nano itself, maybe.  But of the
^W^Y and ^W^V keystrokes, I doubt it.  I quickly learned to use
M-\ and M-/ (for most users the Alt key works), and I would use
Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End if I didn't have to hold the Fn key to get
Home and End.

> ^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.

> Surely there will be other surprises.
> 
> If I did that to my users, a tenth of them would walk away feeling 
> disrespected.
> 
> Clean code and aesthetics are fine,

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.

Benno

0001-input-recognize-the-W-Y-and-W-V-legacy-keystrokes-ag.patch
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