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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