Re: [Nano-devel] [PATCH] Improve execute command prompt

[David Ramsey]

Benno Schulenberg:
> Does your terminal emulator not support tabs?  (Shift+Ctrl+T on Xfce.)

When I'm in X11, yes, but when I'm at the actual console, tabs aren't an
option.  And I know that things like GNU screen and tmux can do similar
things, but their keys for everything are entirely different.  Not to
mention, there's also split screen in the latter options, but I've
always found split screen horrendously confusing; it gets too difficult
to keep track of which side of the screen you're in if you're trying to
edit both files, which means you eventually try to edit the wrong one,
and it turns into a mess.

(For similar reasons, I would be opposed to the patch adding multipane
support to multibuffer mode; if I liked that kind of thing, I would have
added it myself back when I added multibuffer support ages ago.)

> And why put nano to sleep?  I normally just close nano, do what I need
> to do, and then reopen the same file.  The cursor will be at the same
> spot (because of position history) and all the search strings are still
> there too.  Only the cutbuffer will be gone, and the undo stack, but
> apparently I don't care about those.  Do you regularly have multiple
> files open so you cannot just close nano?

I generally don't use positionlog, because there are times I want to
start at the beginning of the file instead of where I was before, and
times I don't; it depends on the circumstances.  And yes, I do regularly
have multiple files open, because cutting and pasting between them is
much easier if I don't have to leave nano.  (I do paste from the X11
clipboard in the terminal sometimes, but it seems to have a nasty habit
of turning tabs into spaces, so if I'm incorporating chunks from
patches, and there are tabs in the indentation, that can cause
problems.)

> I would do 'ls --options >xxx' and then in nano ^R xxx <Enter>.  I
> simply wouldn't think of using ^R ^X, because bash has my whole
> history of commands and has command completion and filename completion
> and...

Okay, but the problem with that is I have to remember which temporary
file xxx is what, especially if I'm doing more than one listings (xxx,
then yyy, then zzz, then...), and then having to clean them all up
afterward to avoid unnecessary filesystem clutter.

(And, for the record, I prefer mksh, because I generally find its
line-scrolling behavior much more useful than how bash handles long
lines.)

> Yes, a session history of commands is good, so you can do <Up> and
> edit the previous one or earlier ones.  But across sessions...

Preserving things across sessions is also useful if there's an
unexpected problem; if something crashes (ideally, nothing should, but
things to happen), things still get preserved as much as possible.  For
a real-life example, If something eats up enough CPU that X11 stops
responding in any normal timeframe, and I have to do Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
or worse, fewer things get lost if sessions are preserved.

> So, basically you use nano's ^R ^X as a mini shell?  Where you can run
> different commands in separate buffers so you have separate
> scrollbacks?

Yes.  For minor things like my examples (within reason; I have no
interest in having nano turn into Emacs in terms of its capabilities),
it's much more convenient to not have to switch into and out of nano,
because that means switching from one interface to another, and then
having to keep track of which one I'm in, and...

In short, I just find I work much better when I don't have to keep a
bunch of extra things in my head, unless absolutely necessary.  It's
obviously different for some other people.