Re: OT: GUI [was:]Ann: TeXCAD 4.1

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org> wrote:
:> There are interfaces with a strong emphasis on the mouse (3 buttons
:> and  no nervousness wheel) that are still surprisingly productive.
:> Plan 9 for example.
: 
: Productive at what sort of task?

For example at editing and manipulating text. The whole OS
interface is drawn on a graphics display, and every piece of
text, not matter what kind, can be used both as text data, and as
a command. The distinction is made by "activating" the relevant
portion of text with the middle mouse button for commands.
Have you ever succeded in copying the text of a command button
off that user interface control?

E.g. if I write | fmt in this paragraph and I want to reshape
say the above paragraph, I mark the above paragraph and then drag
the mouse along ^^^^^ above with the middle mouse button pressed.
Effect: The marked paragraph is piped through fmt.
The paragraph can be anywhere in any window. Another level of
OS integration.

It is really very handy. If you want to do cut&paste in Emacs
from the keyboard, you mark a region, kill, move (e.g. by searching
or switching buffers), stop the search or adjust point in the
buffer, and yank.

In ACME (a multitrack programmer's editor, but may be used for
news reading/writing, file system browsing, or whatever, sounds
familiar? :-) this is all done very quickly using just the mouse
without interruption. That is, the mouse can cut, no menu or keyboard
involved, can be used for navigation and searching, and it can then
paste.
(Please note the intermediary navigational step, this is neither
the same as dragging, nor is it the same as copy&paste.)

You can thus build your own toolboxes (a.k.a menues) by just
displaying a file of commands or boilerplate text for TeX, Ada etc.
No per application knowledge of how to find/get the template text is
required, it's part of the OS, and completely "scriptable" (again,
recursively, using the same facilities) :-)

Actually you can write Help files containing the text of commands
and this text can actually be used to produce the effects that the
help file describes, like this.

  +-------------------------------+
  | To produce an executable,     |
  | cd /u/you/foo and then        |
  | run gnatmake -Pfoo.gpr        |
  |  ...                          |

Just drag the the pointer along "cd ....foo" with the middle
mouse button pressed and then along "gnat....gpr". Done.  Is this
integrated or not?  And if you compiler happens to be gcc34-gnatmake
or adabuild, you as a user can adjust the help file.
(Again this is not the same as commands built into Windows or Mac
OS X etc help files. As a user, you cannot start editing Windows help
files, and you cannot add arbitrary commands to an existing help
file, can you?) ;-)