Re: Fw: nano key bindings

[Seb]

Hello,


> To me, nano's intended audience was always the 1st year University 
> student sitting down at the terminal in their CS101 class, who is 
> actually looking at and being grateful for the 'bottombars', with the

I'm not a Nano developer, just a regular user of Pico then Nano for 
28 years.

I use ^F many times a day. I navigate inside a line with ^Space to jump to 
the next word, ^Q (rebinded) to jump to the beginning of a word (or to the 
word before), then finish positioning with ^F/^B. The letter F's position 
on a qwerty keyboard, right next to the letter D, makes it an irresistible 
proposition for me when compared to the far away Right key.

I understand that another key binding for searching would be useful in 
some edge cases whose frequency is increasing according to testimonies. It 
may be more in line with nano's welcoming nature to favor new users, the 
least likely to know what a .nanorc file is, and so to give them ^F (or 
^/, although it's somewhat awkward to hit without looking at the 
keyboard).

What's really important for me is that ^W remains a valid key stroke for 
searching (even if not advertised on the menu lines), including the 
sequences ^W^Y and ^W^V which I use everyday too, to navigate but also to 
cut large chunks. Because of these sequences, I'm not sure a simple 
rebinding would do. And rebinding ^F to move forward a char is OK.

I'm pretty sure, though, that changing ^F will get you (the devel team) a 
ton of criticism from old timers, who may say that the ^F binding was 
inspired by the holy shell, or just "logical" ("F"orward), and that ^F is 
Microsoft-y, where is Unix going, etc. So in a way, switching will be a 
bold decision.

One final thought : I understand that the matter stems from the browser 
hijacking ^W instead of delegating it to Nano. Why would the browser not 
hijack ^F too and start searching on the page? Maybe I didn't understand 
the setup correctly.

(And Benno, on Firefox you can still activate in the settings one of 
everybody's favorite features of Mozilla : "search as you type", without 
pressing ^F first; you can even click links by pressing Enter.)

Hope this helps, and thanks for your great work!

Sebastien.