On 3/28/2017 6:55 PM, John Yeung wrote:
[Buck insisted:]
Thus 'Word, or some other Windows app'.
But I'm
still at a loss why Word is a good example here. Different
applications use different keystrokes to do things. A true statement,
to be sure. What does that tell me? How does that help me understand
why LPEX is such an oddball? Why did he pick a word processing program
rather than a programmer's editor? If the point was just to pick an
example of "Windows software at large" why not pick Internet Explorer
or Notepad or Paint?
For our cohort, there's SEU or RDi. There's no other programmer's
editor and thus no exemplar that is particularly useful. If Word popped
into my head first, it's because it's vaguely associated with editing...
something.
How does that help me understand
why LPEX is such an oddball?
This is a perfect question! The answer lies in how one defines
'oddball' (an even better word than clunky if you ask me).
SEU is an ancient and wonderful beast, built and deployed before the
days of Windows, PCs and all that stuff. As a result, the workflow that
SEUers have mostly doesn't include a task that resembles 'select text,
copy to clipboard, reposition, paste'. SEUers do something completely
different: CC...CC, B, type, type, typity, type.
As a result, 'normal' for SEUers is quite different to 'normal' for
Windowsers. SEUers use other Windows programs of course, and none of
them have CC...CC so in Word, or IE, or Lotus 1-2-3, they hold down the
Shift key and select text that way... or with a mouse. (Which is the
same mental process... a stream selection to choose the text to be
moved/copied.)
When an SEUer comes to RDi, she can absolutely use the Windows
select/clipboard paradigm she's already familiar with in non-programming
tasks )like writing a weekly status for her boss using Word). Lpex has
two additional selection modes though. Like Client Access (which
statistically most SEUers use to get at SEU), Lpex has a rectangle /
block select. To peel off a column of text. Hm, column-oriented...
where have I seen that before? :-) Something few other Windows programs
can (or want to) do. But SEUers have 20+ years of familiarity with
block selection, so that doesn't seem oddball in Lpex.
What does seem strange is Line Selection.
Because although dealing with blocks of lines is familiar to programmers
on other platforms, /our/ norm is SEU, which handles blocks of lines
with CC, DD, MM, RR, LL, not the clipboard. Totally different mental
paradigm.
midrange.com
