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

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org>]

Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> writes:

> 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.

Hmm. I assume the output of fmt is piped back to the same selected
region?

Emacs (on X Windows or MS Windows) doesn't have that same level of
dynamic binding of commands to selection regions; that is interesting.

But, if I want to format a paragraph, I don't want to hunt down a
piece of screen that happens to have "| fmt" in it; I want to hit one
key that formats the paragraph surrounding the insertion point,
according to the language mode of the buffer. Emacs does that out of
the box for many languages, and allows me to define new modes and
specify the formatting function.

> 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.

Yes. All done with keystrokes; very quick and easy.

> 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.)

The mouse can do that in Emacs as well. And in MS Word, or any other
GUI editor I've used.

But the point is, what are you doing before and after the cut and
paste? Normally, I would be typing along on the keyboard, and realize
I want to copy some text from "over there" to "here". Do I move my
hand over to the mouse, cut and paste, then move back and continue
typing? No; that's a waste of time.

If you are claiming the mouse cut&paste is enough _faster_ than the
keyboard cut&paste that it is a net savings, please say so. I doubt it.

> 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) :-)

If you can make the bindings of commands to keys persistent, that
could be a nice way for beginners to start building their own
keybindings. But if I'm going to use those bindings for the next
twenty years, it's worth my time to learn how to write them in a more
structured way.

> 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?) ;-)

I do the same thing in Emacs all the time; I have text files that
contain the same sort of instructions; explanatory text mixed with
commands. Simple keystrokes execute the commands; no mouse needed.

And again, Emacs runs on every host OS I need. So I get this same
level of integration on Windows, Lynx, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc.

What other operating systems does ACME run on?

-- 
-- Stephe