Re: The Modernization of Emacs: keyboard shortcuts pain
- From: Gernot Hassenpflug <gernot@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:59:43 +0900
Xah Lee <xah@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Xah Lee wrote:
«
Why Emacs's Keyboard Shortcuts Are Painful
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_kb_shortcuts_pain.html
»
Alain Picard wrote:
«First of all, they're not called "shortcuts", they're called "key
bindings".»
"Keyboard Shortcuts", is the more well known and standard term.
"Keybindings", is almost unknown, except among Emacs users. The above
is the practical aspect. In a idealistic aspect, it is arguable that
I perceive you are Asian...
Look, this is just an idea, but there is a conceptual difference
between a world that emphasizes the visual, the effect, and hides the
mechanism; and one which emphasizes the mechanisms and how things
work. Mainly because in one world the users are forced to not
understand, and in the other the users can understand if they wish. In
any case, in the second world, users get to the effects by the route
of first understanding the mechanisms. That way, they undertstand not
only the "desried" effects, but also all the limitations and foibles.
For what its worth, the difference between the textual and literal
(=detailed, accurate w.r.t mechanisms) thought in the West, and
visual and presentational (=emotive, appealing, innaccurate w.r.t
mechanisms) thought in the East, are similar. To me this is a
terrible misuse (in a business sense a fantastic success in creating
a consumer culure) of the first-class visuo-geometric capabilities of
Asian people (it doesn't work nearly as well in the West, where
people generally get turned off by such methods and in any case as
far as I've read we lack the same level of visuo-geometric IQ).
It also explains in some ways the tendency in Japan to not be
innovative or go into business for yourself, but to hang with the big
guys for protection.
Now, of course the exceptions are legion, and all the Asian people
I've met who are number one in their field are as precise in their
understanding of the mechanisms of their field and would never think
to put this precision in a way that hides the mechanism unless they
were trying to fool non-experts, but you're not talking about the
exceptions here, you're saying the norm want keys that reflect the
effect rather than the mechanism. Sorry, emacs is not commercial
software, and people want to stay close to the mechanism, because
nobody else is going to do the legwork but the users themselves.
--
Gernot Hassenpflug
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