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Re: [Nano-devel] wishlist


From: David Lawrence Ramsey
Subject: Re: [Nano-devel] wishlist
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 02:01:06 -0400
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5 (X11/20051201)

Benno Schulenberg wrote:

<snip>

> They do make sense.  For someone knowing the editor inside out this
> order makes perfect sense.  But for someone new to nano who has a peek
> at the help text to get an idea of what the editor can do, the text is
> -- with all due respect -- a bewildering confusion.

Okay, I suppose I am a bit biased...

> In my opinion the text should rigorously group keys according to their
> functions.  It could look something like this:

<snip>

> The reasoning for this arrangement:
>
> * The exit key should come first, the other file operation are
>   grouped along with it.
> * Search and Replace.
> * Cut and Paste.
> * Then mark/select, as it affects both of the previous operations.
> * Movement back and forth.
> * Movement to start and end.
> * Switching buffers.
> * Insertion and deletion (quite late, because most people will simply
>   use Delete and Backspace, and the M-V is somewhat advanced).
> * Special movement.
> * Advanced things with paragraphs and words.
> * Displaying stuff.

This sounds good for the most part, but I have two questions:

1. The help key is first in all the other lists (and the help toggle is
the first in your reorganized toggle list below), so why is it last
here?

2. The way the shortcut lists are set up, the onscreen shortcuts on the
bottom two lines will be in the same order as the help shown in the
online help text.  This means that we'll lose Pico compatibility unless
the first 12 shortcuts (the ones that use F1-F12) remain the same. (This could be changed if there were two lists, one for the online help
text and one for the onscreen shortcuts, but that would be far too much
of a hack.)  Given this, how would you organize the shortcuts if the
first 12 shortcuts don't move?

> * Toggles affecting the way things are displayed.
> * Toggles that affect editing.
> * Toggles having to do with peripheral things.

Your proposed toggle order does make more sense than the current order,
so I've added it to CVS.

> You'll notice the addition of ^W^Y and ^W^V; in my opinion these basic
> movement key combinations must be mentioned in the main help text: one
> can't expect the user to go looking for them under ^W.

True.  Unfortunately, adding references to a different shortcut list
will make things even uglier than they already are, but I've worked
around that by adding meta sequences for them in the main list, as I
already did with e.g. the paragraph movement functions.  Meta-\ is
equivalent to ^W^Y, and Meta-/ is equivalent to ^W^V, mainly because I
couldn't think of any other pair of keys that could be easily associated
and wasn't already used.  (Of course, when I get around to looking into
your last idea of using a shortcut to display the next 12 shortcuts,
I'll have to use something other than M-/.)

> The text may now look pretty messy, but this is IMO compensated by
> having some logical order.  An order that will hopefully make some
> sense to newcomers, for whom the help text is mainly meant.

Certainly.  Thanks for your feedback.





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