Flexible squeak - a call for extension mechanisms

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Tue Jul 15 15:30:15 UTC 2003


On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Lex Spoon wrote:

[snip]
> I still don't get the keystrokes case in particular.  Clearly there is a
> desire, from all the smart people who want it, but maybe we can do
> better by simply improving the standard keymap?

There is no "keymap". There's lots of grotty code. That's the problem.

> Honestly, is Johhny Kidd going to download Squeak and start messing with
> the key layout?  What about Fred McEducator?  Maybe university students
> will want to do it on occasion, if they are bored.  For CS researchers,
> maybe as many as 1/10 will want to do it, and that's the top percentage
> in a small group.

What about Rhetoric Ben? How about Emacs Charlie? How about French
Keyboard Layout McDuff?

I really really want to denigrate this line of..well..."argument" seems
strong. I see you're all excited about it, but c'mon.

Take themes. Or preferences. Very few people will add either themes or
preferences. But it's *REALLY GREAT* to have some structured, relatively
clean way of doing this. A little bit of support there rocks. It's great
for learning.

It's not like we're advocating people being able to change the background
color of a specific pane of a specific window on an ad hoc basis...whoops,
we are :) And it rocks.

Personally, I might like having a set of alternative general keymaps.
Sure, it can make documentation trickier (but I have some thoughts about
that too).

>  Can you imagine if the Macintosh had shipped and the
> welcome screen invited users to arrange their key combinations?

Strawman. Can you imagine if people hacked keycommands in ResEdit or
bought macro packages like QuickKeys, OneClick, KeySequencer, etc.? Oh
wait, they like it.

Right now, i'd LOVE to be able to fix the stupid MacOSX programs that
stupidly don't bing cmd-H to Hide Application.


> Oh well.  I guess I'm now waiting for someone to propose that the menus
> be customizable.

Already suggested that. You can stop waiting.

>  Can't decide whether an item should go in "help" or
> "debug" ?  Aww, who cares, ship it randomly and let the user fix it up.

Not randomly, but perhaps not optimized for everyone.

> Call it the ultimate in personalization.  It's a feature.

Since it's already *possible*, and already *used* (to, oh, make shorter
menus?) what's wrong with *supporting it properly* rather than by evil
hacks?

Plus, I think it *would* enhance the exploratoriness of the system. I can
already, mostly, drag menu items out of menus, why not menu items into
them?

That's rhetorical, by the way :)

Cheers,
Bijan "Rhetorical Ben" Parsia.



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