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 â and â).
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,
...).
I recently looked into this. Best of
the bunch seemed to be FE and jEdit, but NONE I could find treated a fold as a
logical unit the way F did. My test was to fold a block, indent it, and
unfold. If the indent applied to entire content then it would
pass. Most useful here is to comment an arbitrary block out. Only
F did these things (unless someone out there has found something else!). F IS
still around as an exe, but all source seems to have vapourised. Can
find neither time nor student to write a substitute.