Re: [9front] rio: resize flash patch

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

So much I could reply to, so much potential for snark... but no. :)

On Mon, Nov 30, 2020, at 1:48 AM, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> Quoth Alex Musolino <alex@musolino.id.au>:
> > 
> > Yeah, it *was* added for a time (changeset d0a53c92a84d) but later removed
> > because it caused some problems (changeset a43c3e5624da). For what it's worth,
> > I happen to like the ability to vary the stride of a scroll wheel click.  I'd
> > like to see this feature in acme.
> 
> Agreed, I like it too. Also: The distance down the window controls the speed
> of scrolling everywhere else.
> 
> But I get it -- it's definitely something that threw me off until I realized
> what was actually going on. If you don't know what changes scroll speed, having
> things scroll half a page at a time sometimes, but only a line at a time at
> other times can be disorienting.

This is it, yup. My real problem with it is that when it appeared, my life was a whirlwind of socialisation and creativity. 9front was my tool for organizing everything, chatting, and creating for text-based MUSH games. I didn't have time to begin to consider thinking about trying to adapt to change when 9front changed something I used instinctively all the time.

Rio and Acme were great with MUSH games. I'd connect with Rio in noscroll mode so my reading wouldn't be thrown off by lines of text arriving, and of course scrolling down is a convenient key. In Acme, I'd write and edit room, object, and character descriptions with newlines and tabs They'd be between brackets which I'd double-click to select a whole description, and then middle-drag over a nearby line to encode the tabs and newlines, prepend the change command and object ID, and send the result to /dev/snarf. A middle-click in Rio (which was always on 'send'), and the game would get the change. Easy! Except for the middle-drag. I think it was ssam which made the changes since they needed to be transient. 

I do recall setting up the sam commands was tough, but once they were done they were reusable. A big part of why I didn't fork Acme & Sam after my life settled down was this difficulty I always had with regexps and Sam command language and other languages and even the way they wrote C. I struggled with all of them. I managed to get some skill with regexps by sheer force of effort, and of course the simplicity of the other languages helped, but I'm doing Forth and Plain English Programming now.