Re: [Sheflug] vi, emacs, sharp sticks

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Will" == Will Newton <will [at] misconception.org.uk> writes:

    >> Well, actually it exposes too much; most anything you can
    >> imagine doing is only 2 or 3 keystrokes away.

    Will> Sorry, I meant the graphical interface. The menus are very
    Will> limited and cryptic, and TBH xemacs doesn't do much better.

XEmacs 21.2 is substantially better (or at least tries to be).  Menu
design is hard.

If you have more specific criticisms than "limited and cryptic" please
send them to me.  We are now pushing toward a release (1st Q 2001) and
UI is at the top of several lists for improvement.  ("Limited and
cryptic" is important for us to hear, of course, but we know that
already; we're just not sure how to deal with it :-(.  )  They don't
have to be much more specific to be of some use, but the more specific
the better.

Complaints and suggestions about _either_ Emacs are acceptable.  I
can't personally do anything about the GNU Emacs project, but they are
similar, and I can pass suggestions on to them.  (You can do it
directly, too, if you prefer.)  They probably won't do anything about
it for a while :( because they are in pretest for v 21, and their
development model makes it difficult to make this kind of change
unless it's specifically targeted as a "current task."

What XEmacs really needs to do is make more use of dialog boxes rather
than menus.  But that is expensive in terms of the learning curve;
most Emacs programmers have no trouble with menus; a menu item is a
one-liner.  Dialog boxes require more thought and quite a few lines of
code.  And they are noticably slow, still.  (GTK XEmacs fixes the
last, but it's even worse because at this point you have to use a
separate interface; the standard Athena-style interface used by XEmacs
dialogs doesn't cut it in the GTK world.)

Once again, suggestions are welcome.  We've been aware for some time
that "all the defaults suck," but there is no consensus about how to
deal with it.



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