Yeah, I seriously given up when I saw the "appeal to authority" of $50 million. I mean, how is this:
> We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface.
Relevant to anything? I'm supposed to feel intimidated by a heap of dollars, right?
Where are the exact experiments described and results presented? Where is the paper with all of these details? I searched the web, but I couldn't find it. Perhaps I need to pay some $.
There's a commentary on this piece by Jeff Atwood, which points out the fact that the article is seriously old and that understanding of the issue has changed in the meantime. I can't say for sure, but from what little info there is in the article it seems that way - I'm not going to argue that there are efficient mouse-centric interfaces being designed and used or that the mouse should never be used as an input device. What I'm saying is that there is a least one keyboard based interface for text editing which is more efficient than equivalent mouse based interfaces - for the most part. I admit that there may be some tasks easier to accomplish with mouse (although we didn't see them yet), but that doesn't invalidate my argument, especially because if they exist, then Vim allows for mouse usage to do them.
The AskTog article is linked to from a page on Plan9 editor, Acme - it's another piece which uses ancient version of vi for comparison. It's so frustrating to see people completely ignore all the development in the Vim interface because it's early versions were much worse. And they are prominent people in our industry, too. It's just sad.
I now have some idea about what makes editing efficient. I may even create the next AppleWriter, although I think Chris Granger already does a good enough job. Almost nothing lutusp said turned out to be true, but the thinking I put into this discussion let me realize some important things about editing. So, on the whole, I don't think I wasted this time.
However, any more than this I feel would be a waste.
> We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface.
Relevant to anything? I'm supposed to feel intimidated by a heap of dollars, right?
Where are the exact experiments described and results presented? Where is the paper with all of these details? I searched the web, but I couldn't find it. Perhaps I need to pay some $.
There's a commentary on this piece by Jeff Atwood, which points out the fact that the article is seriously old and that understanding of the issue has changed in the meantime. I can't say for sure, but from what little info there is in the article it seems that way - I'm not going to argue that there are efficient mouse-centric interfaces being designed and used or that the mouse should never be used as an input device. What I'm saying is that there is a least one keyboard based interface for text editing which is more efficient than equivalent mouse based interfaces - for the most part. I admit that there may be some tasks easier to accomplish with mouse (although we didn't see them yet), but that doesn't invalidate my argument, especially because if they exist, then Vim allows for mouse usage to do them.
The AskTog article is linked to from a page on Plan9 editor, Acme - it's another piece which uses ancient version of vi for comparison. It's so frustrating to see people completely ignore all the development in the Vim interface because it's early versions were much worse. And they are prominent people in our industry, too. It's just sad.
I now have some idea about what makes editing efficient. I may even create the next AppleWriter, although I think Chris Granger already does a good enough job. Almost nothing lutusp said turned out to be true, but the thinking I put into this discussion let me realize some important things about editing. So, on the whole, I don't think I wasted this time.
However, any more than this I feel would be a waste.