Re: [9fans] Alternative to fine-grained mouse usage?

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

I used to enjoy Acme, but had to give it up when I no longer had an ergonomic desk. Using the mouse hurt too much. In the way I work, often switching files, Sam's menus are practically worse than Acme. I tried sam -d (command-line only) and ed, but... well, I get in a muddle with regexps. Most people don't, and Plan 9's are more regular than most, so I recommend sam -d. It's a bit cleaner and more powerful than ed. The weakest point in sam -d is still switching files, you have to type whole filenames, but I think if you never use the plumber, you won't have to type any full pathnames. You could also use ed. It's one-file only, but sam -d can't display line numbers, ed can.

With a usable text editor, you can write temporary scripts to work around the issue of reissuing commands. For all but the simplest commands, I prefer that way of working to a regular command line. When I needed to write more than Acme/Rio features comfortably allowed, I'd name a temporary script tt or ss or something. If you don't want to make them in your working directory, you'll want a short path for them. Perhaps `bind -bc /tmp/bin /bin` and in sam, `B /bin/tt`.

Incidentally, I barely used the scrollbars. I used the up and down arrow keys, home and end, or sometimes if I was in a hurry, page up & page down. I did use the scrollbars for precise pagination when reading plain-text ebooks or 9front commit messages, but I didn't really need to.

As for Rio, from looking at your mail, am I right in saying you know how to have the riostart script open windows, and that you can reuse them? I wrote scripts to get the screen size and calculate the figures for the window corners. I don't know where they are now, but they were very short. The only catch is quoting can get funky in this one case of . It's not bad, just some surprising runs of ''''' every time you need a quote.

I'm tired today. I've only just now remembered some other options:

There's also a Vim port. I can't remember if it runs in vt(1) or stand-alone. I also can't remember if it's been updated. Perhaps ask in 9front channels, one of the regulars was/is a Vim user.

Speaking of vt, if you can find/port/make rlwrap, you could use rc under vt with command history and keyboard editing. These features are also nice with sam -d or ed. (Yes, Plan 9 purists, I was naughty enough to try it. ;)


On Thu, Jul 1, 2021, at 2:15 AM, Dworkin Muller wrote:
> I have physical issues with trying to perform fine-grained mouse
> operations (uncontrollable small hand tremors).  The net effect is
> that anything more much specific than window selection is difficult
> and takes several seconds - pretty much the antithesis of the study
> results that showed that editing using the mouse to point to where you
> want to type, select text, etc was as efficient as keyboard-driven
> edit.  To give an idea of the scale of the problem, it's difficult to
> get the mouse positioned into the scrollbars or the command bar of
> acme windows, let alone point between two specific characters for
> inserting new text.
> 
> So, my question is, are there any viable alternatives for use with
> Plan9?  Throwing special hardware at the problem unfortunately isn't
> all that viable mainly due to budgetary issues - all the other
> environments I use support keyboard short-cuts for just about
> everything, so it's hard to justify spending any significant amount of
> money for what is essentially a low-priority hobby.
> 
> If the answer is just to use sam, I can do that, but it doesn't really
> help the problem of needing to copy/paste previous commands in
> terminal windows, etc.
> 
> Hopefully I'm missing something obvious....
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Dworkin

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