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Posted Aug 5, 2010 4:19 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: GUADEC: A message from the release team

It's encouraging to see sanity emerging in the Gnome team.

Here's hoping Gnome 3 won't force Nautilus on everyone just because "people find it useful". Recent Gnome 2 releases have made an effort in that direction, but you can still turn it off in Gconf by changing desktop/gnome/session/required_components_list to "[windowmanager,panel]". There was a trend to force the issue by shoveling random things like desktop background settings into Nautilus and out of Metacity or Gnome-session or wherever they're done now, but that seems to have subsided. Certain individuals have actually told me I should run Nautilus anyway, and just turn off all its visible features, if I don't like it. Loopy.

I wonder if the Emacs edit key bindings will finally be retired. They aren't supported in current Epiphany edit windows, the checkbox in the settings dialog was wiped out long ago, and the help text in Gconf suggesting how to enable it was scrubbed. I wonder what is supposed to be so awful about supporting control keys for editing.

It's disappointing to find them still talking about Mono programs like Tomboy. Weren't they planning to replace that with a regular program?

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 4:45 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] (7 responses)

I wonder who thinks losing Emacs edit bindings is a good thing, and why? I've been using them for years, and surely I must not be the only one.

While I understand the desire to simplify things for novice users, I don't like the direction of completely removing functionality used by advanced users.

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 9:15 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

Even the Mac supports C-a and C-e shortcuts, at least. Often it seems that 'making things simple' really means 'making them like Microsoft Windows'. But then, some useful shortcuts for refugees from the Windows world - like double-clicking a window in the top left to close it, or C-Esc to bring up the start menu - aren't added either.

In general, the principle of least surprise suggests that common keyboard shortcuts should be supported wherever possible. The exception is if they might often be typed by mistake. But Emacs keybindings aren't the kind of thing you can type by mistake.

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 18:55 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Mac OS X can support emacs keybindings without a problem because it doesn't use the control key for shortcuts. The mac uses the command (or "Apple" key) as the shortcut modifier. That leaves control mostly unused, so there's no conflict by having it do emacs things in text boxes.

That logic doesn't apply to Linux, which instead uses a somewhat random combination of Alt/Meta and Control to invoke shortcuts in most apps.

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Posted Aug 6, 2010 9:33 UTC (Fri) by etienne (guest, #25256) [Link] (4 responses)

> I wonder who thinks losing Emacs edit bindings is a good thing, and why?

Initially, Microsoft.
It all started when they decided to replace the standard Shift-Delete/Shift-Insert for cut&paste by the much more intuitive Control-C/Control-V.
Not at all related to bother Windows users who try Unix.

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Posted Aug 6, 2010 15:25 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, Microsoft pinched these shortcuts from Apple. In Apple's original (mid-1980s) Human Interface Guidelines, there is an explanation of the rationale behind the shortcuts. One must admit that »Control-C« for »copy« does make a certain amount of sense, while the wedge-shaped letter »V« in »Control-V« is supposed to suggest squeezing something in at some point, hence »paste«. Doesn't seem all that stupid, now does it – unless you're carrying lots of Unix baggage in your head, where »Control-C« means »kill the current process«.

Now Apple may or may not have come up with these by themselves or they may have in turn adopted the usage from the Xerox Star, which inspired the Macintosh GUI by way of the Apple LISA (I wouldn't know), but in this particular instance Microsoft doesn't appear to be the culprit.

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Posted Aug 6, 2010 19:18 UTC (Fri) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link]

The actual question is why did Microsoft (and the CDE) choose "Ctrl" rather than the "Alt" key to emulate the Apple settings.

Earlier precedence with MSDOS programs (and with X and Andrew) was that "alt+letter" was far more often used to trigger actions. Also the Alt key on the PC at that time was positioned in exactly the same place as the "command" key on a Macintosh. So it would seem a no-brainer to use the Alt key instead.

I have a few theories as to why ctrl was chosen but I don't really know:

1. CDE wanted to work on machines that did not have any extra key other than Ctrl.

2. Non-PC programs designed for serial terminals had to use ctrl+letter for shortcuts, so they may have thought they were being consistent with this (though they were wrong, as they failed to think of the terminal emulator itself as a program). This may also explain the unintuitive use of shift+insert/del to avoid the shortcut key for operations that were not supported by older terminals.

3. Microsoft wanted existing MSDOS programs to be easily ported to run in a window. Since most were using Alt+letter for shortcuts they used ctrl to avoid interfering.

4. Some foreign keyboards were using the Alt key for typing non-ASCII letters (though was this actually prevalent in 1986?)

If anybody has the real reason, it would be interesting.

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Posted Aug 9, 2010 9:08 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

Personally, I really found the new combinations much better when Microsoft introduced them. I never managed to learn Shit+Delete, most of the time I wanted to copy (Ctrl+Insert), not cut, and Ctrl+C followed by Ctrl+V was so much easier than Ctrl+Insert followed by Shift+Insert.

Specially nice was that Cut (X), Copy (C) and Paste (V) are all together in the QWERTY keyboard, and all are enabled by the Ctrl key. By contrast, Shift+Del, Ctrl+Insert, Shit+Insert are simply more cumbersome.

And I think the exact think could be said about that Emacs and Vi key bindings too. They may be useful for the small part of the World that is the Emacs (and Vi) heavy user community, but bring nothing to the vast majority of us.

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Posted Aug 9, 2010 19:32 UTC (Mon) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

I'm not at all suggesting that Windows-like (or Mac-like) key bindings should be removed. I'm just complaining that emacs-like bindings shouldn't be removed either. If there's an issue with them, then there should be a setting somewhere to select them.

Some of us have been using Emacs for longer than Windows has existed.

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 8:04 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

Weren't they planning to replace that with a regular program?

It IS a regular program

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 8:45 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (10 responses)

Why do you want to take Emacs key bindings away from us Emacs-using folks? What is your goal in alienating us?

On the one hand, you speak up against fewer choices (Nautilus) because you don't like it and it irks you.

On the other hand, you speak up for fewer choices (Emacs key bindings) because you don't care and have no use for it.

Very selfish, don't you think?

So, should I do like you, and speak up for forcing Nautilus on you and demanding Emacs key bindings for me, because I don't care about Nautilus, but care about Emacs key bindings? No, I won't do the same as you -- I'm for _your_ ability to not use Nautilus *and* _my_ ability to use Emacs keys. (And I don't need an UI to configure it, btw; gconftool is fine for me.)

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 9:33 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (9 responses)

Such confusion. I use Emacs key bindings myself, but I suppose Gnome 3 will eliminate them, and then I'll have to do without or switch to KDE.

By the way, for those who haven't discovered it yet, the way to add Emacs key bindings to Gnome programs that haven't eliminated the option yet is to go in Gconf to /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme and type "Emacs" into the text box.

I don't understand why they're not on by default, in addition to Home/End/etc. buttons. Would it be so bad if somebody accidentally hit ctrl-A and their cursor moved?

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 9:46 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Sorry, I really understood you as being for Emacs key binding removal. My apologies.

I blame it on not being a native English speaker. ;-)

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 9:50 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (7 responses)

Yes. Ctrl-A on pretty much every platform means Select All.

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 11:45 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

And Select All is such a *useful* feature in an input line.

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Posted Aug 5, 2010 19:03 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Yep, it sure is.

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Posted Aug 6, 2010 19:21 UTC (Fri) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link] (4 responses)

This is trivially fixed by making ^A select all if you are already at the start of a line, so typing it twice works.

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Posted Aug 10, 2010 9:25 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (3 responses)

Why not do it the other way? Hit ^A once and you select all text, hit it twice and the cursor is moved to the beginning of the line. For extra fun, hit it again to remove the selection. More hits could bring other functionality too, or you can make it a cycle that starts over again.

Note to GNOME/GTK+ hackers: this post was supposed to be completely facetious, not a real suggestion. Please DO NOT DO THAT.

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Posted Aug 10, 2010 15:32 UTC (Tue) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link]

I suspect that you are just making a joke about my suggestion, but what you suggest would require remembering the cursor position while select-all is done, which most editors do not do (the cursor is one end of the selection). Also cyclic modes are a very bad idea, though they were popular with some older Unix editors, they are not user-friendly as the user has to watch to get them to stop, rather than just blindly hitting the key many times to get at the state they want (if it is the last state).

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Posted Aug 11, 2010 23:49 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Sounds like you want the immortal gnxt.

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Posted Aug 13, 2010 12:34 UTC (Fri) by richdawe (subscriber, #33805) [Link]

That would be fun for people using screen's default key bindings, where Ctrl+A starts screen's special key sequences.

I've just about managed to reprogram my fingers to type Ctrl+A A to go to the start of the line instead of just Ctrl+A (in screen sessions).