Flexible squeak - a call for extension mechanisms

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Jul 17 09:21:45 UTC 2003


> [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.

Exactly! this is what I was introducing and called shortcuttable. Then 
I refactored
the ParagraphEditor to only use a keymap that could be shared or not.


>
>> 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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