Re: basic question: going back to dired

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 13:50, Juanma <juanma_bellon> wrote:

> And why should "shortcut" be more fitting than "keybinding"?

I don't know. I'm not even defending the idea that "shortcut" is more
fitting. If anything, I'm defending the idea that "keybinding" is not
very good, not because of any intrinsic quality or defect of the term
"keybinding", just because it is a bit too specifically emacsy for
something that many other programs allow, under a different name. The
best name is the one the users understand more easily (whichever it
may be).

> Emacs does lots more than text editing, and the term
> "buffer" fits fine for all the tasks, where term "file" doesn not.

The term "workspace" fits even better, don't you think? And, what does
think the average user who does intuitively know (I believe) what a
"work space" could be, but not necessarily what a "buffer" is?

> That is called "loosing generality", at least in Spanish, which you
> know.

In my Castilian Spanish it'd be more like "perder generalidad", but I
get your meaning ;-)

> You say that there are only historical reasons for sticking to Emacs
> terminology.

Sorry, but no, I didn't say that. I said:

> There's nothing sacred in
> "buffer" and "keybinding" and "minibuffer", just history.

Of course there are at least two reasons, other than history, to stick
with the statu quo: lack of resources, and existing users' resistance.
:)

I get the feeling that if Emacs had used "shortcut" and "workspace"
since the beginning of (Emacs) times, and the current trend were to
use "keybinding" and "buffer", some old Emacs hands would react
against the idea of change the very same way they do now.

> It's
> all about considering that users (and in particular a user able to deal with
> Emacs: this is not Notepad, ok?) can't deal with remembering what "buffer"
> means, which is nonsense.

Sorry, I don't buy that argument. Of course adopting a commonly used
terminology would help those that are not yet "able to deal with
Emacs". Standards (like the CUA C-x/C-c/C-v keyb... shortc...
whatevers) exist for a reason.

> Juanma (yeah, me too)

Not only that, we're both Juanma B.*

  Juanma Ba.*