Re: Key bindings proposal

[joakim]

Uday S Reddy <address@hidden> writes:

> Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
>
>> Seems unlikely to me.  If keyboard accelerators were so important,
>> those users would all at least try XEmacs, which has integrated
>> keyboard accelerators for a decade or so.  In fact, a *lot* of effort
>> was put into making XEmacs look and feel more familiar to the "new new
>> user crowd" around the turn of the century: menu accelerators,
>> sticky modifiers, tab controls, progress gauges, shifted motion
>> extends selection, and on Windows, native dialogs for file selection,
>> antialiased fonts, copy/cut/paste integration with the Windows
>> clipboard, and a proper printer device.[1]
>
> And, believe me that all of these features were indeed quite useful to
> the new users.  I recall now that it was XEmacs that we had set up in
> the labs and it was this that I had observed the students using in
> ways quite different from me.  I had tried to get a few of the smarter
> ones to use the key bindings, and they tried things like C-o and C-s
> and gave up.
>
> If you already had keyboard accelerators of menus in 2001, well, thank
> you very much for it!  But, it still requires extra RET key strokes to
> confirm selections.  That is what I characterized as inefficient in my
> previous post, i.e., it is not good enough to serve as a substitute
> for key bindings.

I dont understand this. I normaly have menus disabled, but I enabled
them now to see. In the File menu I have an entry like:

  "Visit new file... C-x C-f"

Isn't that a "keyboard accelerator"? I note that Firefox does the same
thing for this menu entry:

 "bookmarks/organize bookmarks ctrl+shif+o"

Or do you mean there is no obvious way to traverse the menus from the
keyboard? Could we then promote the use of F10 already in the menu bar
text? (f10 is bound to menu-bar-open here)

perhaps like the 1st line of the help menu or something:

  "Use F10 to start traversing menus with kbd"

>
> Coming back to the students, the vast majority of them switched to
> IDEs by the time they reached their final year.  So, while we had done
> our bit by introducing them to Emacs, Emacs wasn't able to retain them
> due to its limitations.  In this sense, the previous thread was right
> in focusing on the IDE support.
>
>> But I've never seen a huge flood of new XEmacs users, and *no* new
>> contributors, from that crowd.  The new users are mostly the kind of
>> folk who read software manuals for fun (or to pass the time when
>> they're sitting where the sun don't shine).  And the new contributors
>> all read the manuals.
>
> You are obviously right about that.  However, I don't agree with the
> conclusion.  The user base is still needed to motivate contributors to
> find it worthwhile to come forward.  Mozilla and Eclipse have armies
> of contributors, not because they have great manuals but because they
> have large user bases.
>
>>  > And, Emacs has to fit in.
>> 
>> Why?
>
> Because, otherwise, you raise the barrier to entry so high that only a
> small minority of potential users will be able to get through.
>
> Cheers,
> Uday
>
> PS: Sorry that I haven't gotten around to replying to your other
> posts.  But I am thinking...
>
-- 
Joakim Verona