On Monday 13 May 2002 07:45, Fernando Perez wrote: > > > And it must be easy to change, something like call unselect() > > > after the paste() function (I don't know the code, but I can't > > > imagine this being hard). > > > > You would be surprised :) > > > > Selection code is particularly crufty ... but Jug can it be fixed > > for all cases easily ? > > Well, sorry if I misjudged the complexity of the task. As I said, > I've never actually looked at the lyx code. > > But I do think that you are going to have a lot of people screaming > bloody murder if this goes into a public release. Going against > what basically every text editor/word processor on earth does on > something as common as a paste operation is going to throw a lot of > people off. > > And I think it's not just habit, but there's a good reason for the > common behavior to be so: after you hit 'paste' (whether via > keyboard or mouse) you should be able to continue editing right > there. If the first key you touch automatically destroys your > pasted text (because it remained selected), I can't see that being > anything other than an unpleasant surprise.
I'm inclined to agree. Some word processor conventions come from pretending to be typewriters, but others have evolved through a long process of seeing what users need to do most often, and can do most easily. We can afford to ignore/modify some of the first group (e.g. LyX's ignoring double spaces) but, perhaps because of this, we should be careful to avoid flouting the more sensible conventions, and the pasting issue falls into this category, I think. Similar considerations apply to the GUI, IMHO. When GUI independence is realised, I for one would like to see the cryptic exclamation mark and little man replaced with something a little more guessable. > > I hope this isn't too much of a burden to you guys. I know you've > put a lot of work into this release and we're all waiting eagerly > for it. And we are _really_ grateful for the fabulous tool that lyx > is, honest. Amen to that. Robin -- "Bravo Epictetus!" - Epictetus Robin Turner IDMYO, Bilkent Universitesi Ankara 06533 Turkey http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
