Re: [9fans] Samterm up down key patch

["John Floren" <slawmaster@gmail.com>]

On 11/14/06, maht <mattmobile@proweb.co.uk> wrote:
> Perhaps you long for a line printer and ^j and ^k or have played too
> much nethack :)
>
> Using up arrow and down arrow to scroll is IMHO (eventually) a better plan.

I don't see what's wrong with an interface that allows you to move
forward or backwards a line/character without removing your hands from
the home row (emacs, vi). When I'm editing, removing my hands from the
home row is death. I don't want to have to take my hands away from the
typing position unless I'm doing something like copying and pasting
(which I don't do that often). Maybe I'm just emacs-broke; I often
find myself hitting ^N and ^P in Notepad or Firefox (argggh, no new
windows please, and no printing!).

> Jumping around the text based on the length of the lines and where the
> nearest \r is seems odd now.
>
> If I have a long line of wrapped text, pressing down arrow doesn't go
> down one line, it goes down one paragraph, Lunix's vi's confusing
> jumping cursor should tell you that.

Think about what you're saying here. A line is a string of characters
that ends with a special character (carriage return/line feed,
whatever your O.S. likes to do). If I'm sitting at an 80-column
terminal and I type 130 characters, my text may show up split across
two rows on the screen, but it's still one line. If I type a
600-character line, go to the start, and press ^N (assuming emacs), I
expect to be put at the character *after* the next newline, regardless
of what my screen is telling me.

> YMMV of course.
>
> But please, and I'm sure no-one will, don't change the cursor keys in Acme.
>
> And while you discuss it, don't forget that Home and End are also
> different in plan9 in that they refer to the document not the current line.
>
> matt
>

Yes, I'm a UNIX apologist. Bite my NFS-mounted core file ;-)
VMS, now, *there's* a horse of a different color. Plan 9 may not be
UNIX, but when you're looking at them from the far land of VMS, Plan 9
and UNIX melt into one big mush :-) You may all consider killing me,
as I considered converting my Plan 9 machine into a Linux-based
simh/VMS box until I found out that performance would be terrible.


John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn