Some fundamental usability issues

[Mackenzie Morgan]

On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 02:24 +0100, chombee wrote:
> * The user should never have to press Save. There should not be any save
> buttons anywhere on the computer. Saving is something the computer can
> do automatically all the time, the user never needs to know. Save
> buttons were introduced back when saving a file to disk required the
> computer to freeze for several seconds. They are no longer needed, and
> haven't been for some time! The GTK text editor Scribes is one program
> that handles all your saving for you. Any others?

Don't you ever open up gedit or whatever and use it to paste a bunch of stuff so you can refer to it all in *one* window instead of having to switch tabs a bunch?  Your idea would mean going around having to delete a bunch of temporary files that were autogenerated.

> * This whole business of highlighting some text then pressing a button,
> whether it's paste or just a normal key, and having the highlighted text
> replaced, should be thrown out. This seems to be how it works in every
> text editor, but I think it's rarely what the user wants to do, and in
> the rare cases where you do want to do that you can stand one extra key
> press: highlight, delete, then paste or type in the replacement. **The
> user's content is sacred** and it should never be deleted unless the
> user explicitly selects it and presses delete.

There's no single keyboard button that does that.  There's
middle-click-to-paste, but given that most mice have 2 buttons or 2
buttons and a scroll wheel, this requires a fairly deliberate attempt at
getting the left and right buttons to go down simultaneously.

-- 
Mackenzie Morgan
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com
apt-get moo
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