RE: SEUL: Text editors.

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, George Bonser wrote:

> As for being right-button illiterate, I am sorry.  I find that mode of
> operation quite comfortable.  

But you are not  a SEU who's never seen a UNIX X-Windows machine before.
Why go for a UI that's completely different from what our target audience
are familiar with ? 

> You use the right buton to view things and the
> left to execute them. 

Makes enough sense, especially if it's applied consistently to the whole
user interface. But again, it's only going to confuse our users. If I
found it mildly confusing, they'll be very confused.

> If you are so adverse to having different functions for
> different buttons, why have a mouse with more than one?

Actually, I like the 3 button thing (my favourite conventions are fvwm
hence my left-button bias ... ) It is difficult to invent an absolute
notion of what's "intuitive", aside from what one is familiar with. Hence
imposing very unfamiliar conventions on our users will ultimately confuse
them. I;m not attacking olwm/XView so much as pointing out that it's not
what we should be shooting for in terms of UI design.

> Every program I use uses the right mouse button for the pull-down menus ... 
> I just checked, it works with both.  I am used to using the right button to
> pull a menu down and the left button to select an option.  If you click on the
> option with the left button, it performs a default action.
> 

You're using olwm or olvwm right ? Which is designed along those lines. I
can name several apps that don't work like this but I'm too tired to list
them right now...

> In other words, if you right-click on File, it pulls down a menu.  If you
> left-click on File it performs whatever you designated as the default action
> for that menu.

again, olwm . Which is good for people who've used olwm before. How many
of our target audience fit into that category ?

> I guess I have been workign with Sun systems so long that this behavior is
> natural and having to select the default every time like WIndows seems like a
> waste of time.

Likewise, having to hit the start button (instead of left-click on the
root window) seems like a waste of time to me. Using a crippled editor
like ee or pico also seems like a waste of time to me when I can work more
productively in vi. Try to distance yourself from your personal
preferences and think about the newbies who've never seen anything except
a few Win95 / Mac machines. 

-- Donovan