'Emacs style' delete line shortcut (CTRL/U) doesn't work correctly in Firefox

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2018 at 14:28, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:

> My first editor was TECO on a TeleType when I was a student in the 70s.
> Grad students got to use 30cps video terminals :-)

*Tips hat* ;-)

> I only used 4-5 OSs but yes, the UIs were all different, some crazily so.

In work up to the late 1990s... let me think...

* MS-DOS, DR-DOS
* Windows 2, 3, 9x, NT 3.x & 4
* CP/M, Concurrent CP/M, Concurrent DOS
* SCO Xenix & UNIX
* Novell Netware 2, 3, 4, 5 (all quite different!)
* MacOS (classic)
* DEC OpenVMS
* IBM OS/2 1.x, 2, 3, 4
* IBM AIX
* Acorn MOS
* DR GEM
* Alpha Micro AMOS
* PDP-11 with RSTS/E
* IBM S/36 & OS/400
* SunOS & Solaris
* Several dedicated word-processors (QUME, IBM DisplayWriters, etc.)

And more in my hobbyist life, too: ST GEM, AmigaOS, Acorn RISC OS, etc.

More I've forgotten!

> Simple is good. One of the biggest puzzles is why -- after all these
> years -- there is no decent XML editor usable by non-XML people. I did
> some research on this a while back and found that all XML editors do
> indeed implement all the functions an XML editor would be expected to
> have, but they were often buried deep inside menus with naming that
> users did not expect, or worked in an unexpected manner.

Oh my heavens yes.

WordPerfect Corp could probably make a decent fist of it, if they tried.

> > This astonishes many of my colleagues.
>
> I suspect your productivity is well in advance of theirs.

:-D

> Hmm. Odd. I just typed 'emacs mydoc' in a terminal, I get Emacs with
> that as a new file in Fundamental mode, which is "not specialized for
> anything in particular". No autocompletion that I can see, basically
> just a glass typewriter. I'll check my .emacs, as I do use xml-mode on
> *.xml files, but I get the same result if I move .emacs out of the way.

Ahhhh... I never tried on an existing file, or a new blank file. I
just used the buffers there when I opened it to experiment.

> Could well be, although I suspect turning off all major modes would
> result in no functionality at all.

(!)

> Historic holdover to placate the ego of the original author, alas.

Aha! Yes, that makes sense...

> I'd never have been able to survive without them. I daily fix and patch
> other peoples' broken data or text, so being able to automate repetitive
> tasks is important, otherwise I'd have no fingers left at this stage :-)

Interesting. I don't use _editor_ macros for that. In the old days, I
wrote a bit of QuickBASIC or maybe a shell script.

But a good point I'd not really considered.

> Most of my users are probably unaware that they are using macros every
> minute of the day, especially LaTeX users.

True!

> A hallmark of its success is that users are unaware of it.

*Nod*

> Every CS student writes one at some stage, if only to find out why using
> an existing one is a better move :-) But most corporate applications use
> an embedded editor, often written by one of their "partners", and
> frequently incompatible with the rest of the world — but they do tend at
> least to obey Ctrl-C/X/V/Z/P/S. My experience of them is that they are
> flaky, to be polite...

Fair point. The rise of languages with embeddable pre-existing
controls has helped that a lot, in my world.

> Bare-bones Emacs still uses its pre-CUA keystrokes for those functions,
> but those functions are all there in menu. But I very rarely use mouse
> and menus for common functions.

Me either, which is why for the basics, I expect the keyboard commands
to work so I don't have to think about it. Once I'm in the menus
hunting for something, I expect a standard layout.

> No, the Emacs people can do anything they want with the bare-bones
> level, so long as I can have my xml-mode and other conveniences. AFAIK
> they're not interested in making Emacs' bare-bones defaults align with
> CUA, for historical, personal, and small-p-political reasons. I'm not
> really interested in their petty little squabbles: I just use the
> software because it works for what I need to do. Which, mutatis
> mutandis, is basically the same reasoning that you use, and that Michael
> Sperberg-McQueen used in his explanation...just with different results.

Hmmm. Good point. Historical tradition and ego... :-(

> It would be interesting to apply the same logic to people's choice of
> operating system interface. What do Linux UIs *not* do that other do do?

Hmmmm.

I think at the level of casual non-techies, using Macs or Windows,
it's mostly all one now.

And the real casual users are moving to tablets and phones, anyway.
PCs are becoming arcane.

This is one place ChromeOS is strong. Stronger than almost anyone's
noticed. It's a clever play by Google.

I have seen demos of the Canon Cat, in particular, which stands out as
a relatively recent -- early microcomputer era -- radically different,
in many ways radically _better_ UI.

Before that... Well, there was some truly radical stuff in the late
minicomputer era.

We have truly lost *so* much, it makes me almost weep.

Here's a wonderful ½hr 2013 presentation *pretending* to from 1973,
about what _should_ have been the next 40 years. Watch it, laugh, and
then mourn.

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053