> I'm not sure if you're serious here... however, if two-times deleted a > word, that *might* feel intuitive, but I feel very uncertain about it. > Otherwise, there's a difference between the effect of'enter' and > 'backspace' since 'enter' only has a "meaning" the first time it's > pressed.
I don't think that timing should have anything to do with it. We have a very similar and darn useful feature in mathed, namely Ctrl+space, space, space ... Why on earth would one see that as a problem with plain Enter, I can't fathom. I consider the "variable" mathed space to be an ubercool thing - it saves a lot of typing and learning specialized shortcuts. Now, be frank, how many of you really recall all those horizontal spacing TeX macros? See? I find that in many documents I have to frequently insert one of "standard" vertical spacings before or after a paragraph. Multiple-enter functionality would be a great thing to me. Obviously, it's my own personal opinion. As far as the functionality is concerned, when you press enter a standard end-of-paragraph is inserted. You press anything but enter now, the whole multi-enter thing is forgotten. You press enter again - an additional vertical space is inserted. Enter again - that vertical space is undone and some other vertical space is inserted. And so on, until the cycle repeats with the "last" enter just bringing back the old good end-of-paragraph. That's what ctrl+space, space, space, ... does in mathed. The only difference here would be that it's enter, enter, enter, ..., without a special starting shortcut. I hope you've noticed that there's no mention of any timing here (nor is it necessary), just like in mathed. In mathed, you can press ctrl+space, go for a vacation, come back, and as long as your machine was powered and nothing bad happened (tm), you can press space and your "smallest" math space will be coverted to a next larger one. > Anyway, along the same thinking, you could imagine that pressing > On second thought I might agree with you there... entering text on a cell > phone is kind of annoying when you have the time dependance, but perhaps > that's just because I'm used to it... Maybe someone who writes lots of SMS > can say if he's used to the time dependance? The SMS message writing UI is one of the worst things invented ever. It unnecessarily limits the speed of entering characters, and as such is a big no-no. There are way better ways of entering text quickly and using far less keys than you have on a cellphone keypad. With those 9+ keys (albeit located elsewhere!) you could type actually faster than you do on a QWERTY keyboard, possibly even faster than you could on a Dvorak keyboard. An article long time ago in The Circuit Cellar (http://www.circellar.com) describes a method where 5 keys are used on device that you can easily grip and hold while typing on it. The keys are strategically located so that all the fingers can do their job easily. You choose letters by pressing keys in combinations (2^5-1 combinations, actually) and less-often used keys are done by having two combinations in sequence (which can be depressed almost arbitrarily close together - i.e. as fast as you can do it). It'd be rather trivial to have additional 4 buttons say on the left-hand side of the phone and something in the upper-right hand corner for the thumb. No breaking news here, it's been all said and done 10 years ago at least. The designers are just dumbing down the UI or they don't read Circuit Cellar (if one is into electronics, one really should read that magazine) -- both are equally bad (tm). Cheers, Kuba
