From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,578bd4d051bc4686 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2004-03-27 11:28:42 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!news2.telebyte.nl!news-fra1.dfn.de!eusc.inter.net!cs.tu-berlin.de!uni-duisburg.de!not-for-mail From: Georg Bauhaus Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: OT: GUI [was:]Ann: TeXCAD 4.1 Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 19:28:42 +0000 (UTC) Organization: GMUGHDU Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de X-Trace: a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de 1080415722 6208 134.91.1.34 (27 Mar 2004 19:28:42 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@news.uni-duisburg.de NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 19:28:42 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: tin/1.5.8-20010221 ("Blue Water") (UNIX) (HP-UX/B.11.00 (9000/800)) Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:6614 Date: 2004-03-27T19:28:42+00:00 List-Id: Stephen Leake 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?) ;-)