Re: [wmii] Re: moving liblitz on

On Thu, 25 May 2006 13:28:22 -0700
Uriel <lost.goblin_AT_gmail.com> wrote:

> > > As for insanity like bidirectional text and such abominations, if
> > > you want ICU, you know where to find it; but for sane people that
> > > stuff is a total waste of time.
> >
> > Now you offend everyone with a language that is more complicated to
> > make to work on computers.
>
> That is not my problem, I try to use computers to get work done in
> the most efficient way practically possible, not to do it in the most
> complicated way possible.

That's exactly the point. Obviously, we have different requirements for
text editors. If you don't need the features unicode has to offer,
fine. I do. Sure, let's say we only support ASCII. Then code is simple
as hell, but it does not get things done. If I can't write a mail into
the non-latin world, it simply does not do what it is supposed to do.
We are not talking about fancy malformed paperclip assistants or bouncy
mouse icons or such crap. We are talking about plain functionality,
which people take for granted every day. Every minute on every day on
every planet.

> > > Markup, font, color and whatever, all that crap is at most set
> > > per-widget (if not globally). If you want to interleave that
> > > inside the same text stream then you are not working with text
> > > anymore, and you could as well go use Word.
> >
> > You don't use even syntax highlighting, do you? Your screen is black
> > and white, isn't it? You got a chisel on your desk, and some rock
> > plates, don't you?
>
> I don't think this even deserves answering, but after using syntax
> highlighting for many years, I found that reading code without it is
> much more easy on the eyes, of course you need a good font and sane
> color scheme. Syntax highlighting is just distracting and emphasizes
> the superfluous, syntax. Do you like reading English with all the
> pronouns in bold and all verbs in green?

I would be glad if the human-machine interface (on the programmer's
side) was so simple that it does not need syntax highlighting. Maybe
you are one super genious computer hacker, but I don't have C as my
native language. And I don't cry about it.

> Not to mention that all syntax highlighting systems I have seen fail
> miserably in a text-editor environment because in a text editor you
> _edit_ text, which means 99% of the time the code is not even
> syntactically valid, which means the highlighting jumps around
> randomly as you type becoming even more distracting, that or it
> requires explicit user interaction to be updated, which is even worse.

Yes, those are issues that need to be addressed. Glad someone says
that, I would have not thought about those problems.

> > > All that is really needed is a small api on top of Xrender that
> > > mirrors draw(2), and on top of that some very simple widgets ala
> > > frame(2), and all this should be rather trivial. The hard part is
> > > input handling, because the X input model is completely crap, and
> > > abstracting it is really hard without bending over backwards.
> >
> > There is nothing trivial, but there's also nothing that's
> > impossible to do in a sane way. If you are scared to read things up
> > and inform yourself, don't do it. I /am / ready to implement
> > everything I talked about in this thread, if I get support for it.
> > I won't do it if it is not embedded anywhere I could use it.
>
> If you want all that crap, fine with me, but please take it elsewhere
> with the rest of the people that likes to make their life as
> complicated as possible, I'm sure the Gnome project will welcome you
> with open arms.
>
> I for one want things things to be as simple as possible as long as
> they perform the task they are designed for, a text editor edits text
> they way I tell it to; not tries to look psychedelic, read my mind
> and compile source code at the same time.

That's exactly the point. I want it to display Russian and Chinese
characters. I want it to help me read C. I want it to support the tasks
I want to do, without having to re-think about the differences between
the real world and how it is reflected on my PC.

Greetings,
Denis