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Re: [Nano-devel] dropping an anchor at a place where wants to return


From: David Ramsey
Subject: Re: [Nano-devel] dropping an anchor at a place where wants to return
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2018 13:28:35 -0600

Benno Schulenberg:
> Jumping to two or three places should be easy enough with M-W and M-Q,
> no?  For the example that you give with a global, searching for it and
> then jumping to the different occurrences with M-W and M-Q should be
> even easier than setting a bookmark: it saves striking a combo to set
> the bookmark.  (If there are globals whose names are not distinct
> enough for this to work, then I consider this a "bug" and a renaming
> patch is in order.)

Okay.  However, I do work on code other than nano sometimes, and that
other code doesn't necessarily follow this rule, in which case the
bookmarks would be a better option.  And even in nano, there are times I
want to jump to a place *around* a global rather than directly on it;
jumping to the global and then manually scrolling up or down can be
problematic if I accidentally scroll one line too many.

> But I know what you mean: bookmarking the places of interest and then
> being able to cycle through these places sounds attractive.  I just
> can't see myself using it.

You may not see yourself using it, but some others would.

> It is an issue.  There are almost no free key combos left, so I want
> to assign them sparingly.

Point, but in this case, it may as well be necessary.  See below.

> And I want to make it easier to remember what combo to press for which
> function -- when there are two for the anchoring: which was which
> again?  If you press drop instead of jump, you've lost the point where
> you wanted to return.

In Marco's version, there aren't two for the anchoring.  There's one for
"add bookmark if not on bookmark, remove bookmark if on bookmark", one
for "jump to previous bookmark", and one for "jump to next bookmark".

The first of these doesn't have your problem with pressing drop instead
of jump, since the jump keys are separate from the add/drop key.  Having
the add/drop key relatively far away from the jump keys is actually a
good idea, since it's harder to hit by accident.  And with the statusbar
messages for add/drop, if you accidentally drop when you mean to add,
fixing that is just a matter of pressing the key again.

However, your proposed patch, with one key acting as "add bookmark",
"clear bookmark", and "jump to bookmark" depending on context, is
susceptible to this problem.  It may be simpler in terms of using fewer
keys, but combining jump with add/drop can lead to worse problems than
using one more key.  To compare with Marco's version: if you
accidentally drop when you mean to add, it may be possible to fix it by
pressing the key again, except if it makes you jump to the next bookmark
instead, in which case you have to jump back, etc.

As I brought up with regard to softmark, I have enough problems with
regard to an occasional finger-twitch screwing things up.  I can easily
undo text issues caused by that.  Clearing and jumping to/from
bookmarks, I can't.  So putting add/drop on a separate key, as Marco's
version does, will save me some aggravation when using bookmarks.

> It would work, but... I find it at least as awkward as a three-finger
> combo.

There's probably some other key we can use for this case, then.



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