Modelessness (Was porting UNIX applications to the mac)

[Robert Reed]

In article <2637 at cbosgd.ATT.COM> mark at cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) writes:
>
>Sorry, Bob, I disagree.  Your version of vi (3.7) doesn't show you when
>you're in input mode, but mine (3.10) does; so does the MS DOS PC/VI
>clone.  (It says "INPUT MODE" right there on the bottom line,...

This change sounds like a definite improvement and one that I wouldn't
criticize without having a chance to see it, but an immediate concern of
mine would be how visible this indicator is for someone whose focus of
attention is the cursor, not the bottom of the screen.  I still might not
consider this indication as "obvious."

>There's nothing wrong with being moded, it's just a personal preference.

I agree that modes are useful and far be it from me to presume that either
vi or emacs be considered modeless.  My argument was not for the elimination
of modes, but for the elimination of modes which demonstrate the two
following features:

    o  Their presence is not obvious to the user (whatever this means in
	terms of visual or mechanical feedback).

    o  The mechanism for exiting them is not obvious.

There are features of both vi and emacs that arguably fall within these
dictates.  The criterion for "obviousness" is necessarily vague, because
level of expertise will affect the user's perceptions of natural behavior.
Knowing to hit ESC in vi is a learned behavior, just as is knowing to hit ^G
in emacs to abort multi-keystroke commands.  Neither is particularly obvious
if you don't know about them in advance.

>Mice and other pointing devices are handy for lots of things, but with
>only two hands, you can't keep one hand on the mouse all the time.
>
>...for a text editor, you can't reasonably input new text with a mouse,
>and there's the problem.

Agreed.  Despite the attractiveness of the "cut and paste" style text
editing paradigm, the actual mechanics of using such a system for text
editing are cumbersome.  That is not the same as saying that keyboard driven
editing and cut-and-paste editing cannot be used in concert.  Cut-and-paste
grafted onto emacs would be a definite wart, but a useful one.  


Robert Reed, Tektronix CAE Systems Division, bobr at zeus.TEK