Flexible squeak - a call for extension mechanisms

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Jul 17 09:19:36 UTC 2003


Hi lex

I just want to report to you that:
	- when I arrived in Smalltalk I was so frustrated not to be able to 
change easily the shortcut that I hacked during days to have a kind of 
emacs short-cuts.
	- I saw many VI or emacs guys extremely fed up not to have the key 
they want that
	they always consider smalltalk as weird.
	- Roel extended my short cut stuff and made a good ui on top of it. 
Now people
	like it so much that it is included in the default distro of VW.

	- for my book I wanted to have different shortcut for my editor but 
not system 	wide. I wanted a clever completion for kids.
	and then I had to hack in this &(*&(*&^*&^*&^ugly, horrible, 
paragrapheditor
	and introduce the notion of a shortcut table. Now using this mechanism 
I can 	install a new binding in less than a minute. But I stop maintain 
it because
	apparently nobody cared (it was in 2.8).

So we need a nice way to change the keybinding and not only available 
for the
nerds we are but for everybody.

Stef

> 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?
>
> 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.  Can you imagine if the Macintosh had shipped and the
> welcome screen invited users to arrange their key combinations?
>
>
> Oh well.  I guess I'm now waiting for someone to propose that the menus
> be customizable.  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.
> Call it the ultimate in personalization.  It's a feature.
>
>
> Lex
>



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