Re: [dev] Experimental editor

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 1:49 PM, Kurt H Maier <karmaflux_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 4:15 AM, David Tweed <david.tweed_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm going to assume that what you mean by "The editor doesn't need to
>> do this." is "the computer user doesn't benefit from having undo in
>> the editor rather than a version control";
>
> invalid assumption.  what he meant was 'the EDITOR doesn't need to do
> this; some other piece of software can do it FOR the editor'

The various subtlties in what he could have meant was precisely what I
was trying to get a clarification of. (It seemed silly to wait for a
round trip delay before proceeding to the conversation.) It's not
clear what "use software to handle revision control" is meant to
suggest: is it that you could implement something at the resolution of
a typical editor undo buffer (individual character
insertion/deletions) or is it "you shouldn't need any finer resolution
than you can acheive with a current revision control system?".
Incidentally, to be clear I'm looking at things at the user experience
level: I don't care virtually at all about the difference between an
editor which has an accessible-within-the-editor built-in fine-grained
change buffer and one that acheives an accessible-within-the-editor
fine-grained change buffer provided by an external program. But for me
there's a huge difference between "to undo something on the current
buffer, repeatedly invoke the undo command in the editor" compared to
"open a terminal window, bring up a graphical rev control diff viewer,
find the revision id corresponding to the desired undo point, rewind
and check out that revision, go back to the editor and reload the
file".

cheers, dave tweed
Received on Thu Jun 16 2011 - 15:18:01 CEST