On 14 Dec 2006, at 16:18, Barry Cook wrote:
We have a fundamental problem in having a large number of things to express and insisting on being limited to a monochrome, latin alphabet.
We all asked for a bit more, but got Unicode, in a dozen different flavours. Modest lumps of UTF-16 i feel add a lot, without too much pressure on input devices. Have adopted UTF-16 for Honeysuckle, but only to add a smackerel (like ≤ and ≥).
I guess this is partly because we use text editors and simple keyboards. I've not been at all impressed by the productivity of graphics input systems (drag and drop is so slow compared to touching a key or two).
Text editors manage well IMHO. It's the keyboards that are limited. Maybe there's a market for an additional keypad for those extra unicode tidbits.
I wonder if there is some intermediate, maybe a more flexible display (colour, more symbols) and extended keyboard use - I guess ctrl-... is fairly well used by the OS and Applications for shortcuts but ESC-... might offer some possibilities (it was originally intended to be used this way but got a bit hijacked somewhere - Unix?). Of course we might need extended editors
I always hated having to recall keyboard combinations. It would never prove popular. Take emacs commands for example - much hated by every student on my C course.
(what happened to folding? - I don't see much mention of it, even though it is available in Emacs, ...).