Re: Proposal to improve the nomenclature of scrolling directions

[Daniel Hackney]

"Stefan Monnier" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > "up"/"down" alone are ambiguous, of course.  But I wasn't proposing
> > them alone.  I was including also the part that is moving ("view" or
> > whatever name describes the view port).
>
> The real source of the problem is that most users are not aware that
> there's an ambiguity, and so adding "viewport" (which they might even
> not know) or "window" or "buffer content" won't help them much.

Given the universal use of down/up in every other program, I don't see how it's ambiguous. Emacs even has "Top" or "Bot" in the mode line when you are at the beginning or end of the buffer. Moving towards the top is "up", moving towards the bottom is "down".

In the context of elisp code, I think it might make some sense to talk about next/previous lines for the purpose of disambiguation in the face of overlays, longlines and visual-line-mode, but for anything user-facing, "up" and "down" are the standards. I might be too young (25), but I've never come across or considered the possibility that the directions might be reversed. If you press the down arrow on they keyboard, point moves downward and if it reaches the bottom of the window, the buffer is scrolled down.