Re: mc Digest, Vol 102, Issue 3
-- 2. The ghost tabs and ghost single space characters are not transferred anywhere else when mouse-paste is done You mean an exta comminication between the mouse-paster and the editor? Such complications are to be avoided. I understand that there is an option to turn these ghost characters on, or to turn them off. GOOD! Show me how ? As to your statement But paste-ability must take precedence over your special example, because it's a more basic operation. I am in fact not Editing files, or copying pieces of what you are editing to some other place? Me, I spend more time with editing the files. And if what I am editing is code, which is often the case, then I really do not want the hidden characters to be turned off and no way to turn them on. That would render relatively useless an editor which I have come to rely on for much of that work, which would make me unhappy.. No. My requiremet trumps yours. The most primitive requirement is UNIQUE. All further fancy-facilities are merely ONE of an infinite fad posibility. In law and common sense, drinking water may be a human-right; tea, coke...whisky is not. PS. I've hit another arty-crapness, similar to the use of *.pdf, where plain text is adequate and thus better: `links` fills in the line-len with spaces!? Shoot all the grafiti-vandals!! ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
Re: mc Digest, Vol 102, Issue 3
chris glur crg...@gmail.com writes: -- 2. The ghost tabs and ghost single space characters are not transferred anywhere else when mouse-paste is done You mean an exta comminication between the mouse-paster and the editor? Such complications are to be avoided. We already have them. You have to shift click to copy and paste with the mouse. Should we get rid of that as well? I have a good old friend who detests syntax highlighting - he did most of his programming before they became popular. Many people consider a spell checker bloat. You have to realize that you're arbitrarily drawing a line as to what's acceptable and what's artsy. Anything beyond Edlin's capabilities is artsy to some. I understand that there is an option to turn these ghost characters on, or to turn them off. GOOD! Show me how ? In the editor, press F9, go to Options and then General. Then outside of the editor go to Options and Save Setup - this will ensure the behavior is saved for future Midnight Commander sessions. Given that it can be turned off, is there still a problem here? I can understand it would be a serious usability issue if one can't and your grievances would have a lot more weight, but I think it's fine as it is as long as the user can choose it. I suppose one could argue which should be the default mode. No. My requiremet trumps yours. The most primitive requirement is UNIQUE. All further fancy-facilities are merely ONE of an infinite fad posibility. And some of those fancy-facilities is why people use Midnight Commander. Also, I'll add that Midnight Commander lets you use a different editor if mcedit doesn't suit your needs, which makes things much more flexible for the user. -- In an Astronomy class (toward an Astronomy major, not that gen-ed rubbish) the professor did not tell us we would have to remember constants, and he asked them as questions. They were short questions, and weren't worth a lot. One of them was: What is the orbital period of Saturn? (2 pts/100) I started thinking about Bode's law and the posibility I could calculate it from an approximate radius I would get from that law... if I could remember it. But when you expect a 72% to be an A on a test, you have bigger fish to fry. Then I got it. It was right, it should work, and no one would have to be nailed to anything. I wrote: One Saturn-Year I didn't get credit for it. A couple years later a sophomore was telling me about this funny question he had in the same class. He showed it to me. It read: What is the orbital period of Saturn? (Do not put one Saturn-Year) I was so right that it had to be guarded against. Yet those were 2 points I would never have. (as told by SetupWeasel on Slashdot) /\ /\ /\ / / \/ \ u e e n / \/ a w a z mu...@nawaz.org anl ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
Re: mc Digest, Vol 102, Issue 3
On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, chris glur wrote: -- 2. The ghost tabs and ghost single space characters are not transferred anywhere else when mouse-paste is done You mean an exta comminication between the mouse-paster and the editor? Such complications are to be avoided. I understand that there is an option to turn these ghost characters on, or to turn them off. GOOD! Show me how ? Well, I had to go and check on this because I find it rather too inconvenient to turn this stuff off and on all the time. But the following does work: 1. You are editing a file where you see the objectionable -- things which indicate tabs, and you want them to go away. So ... 2. Hit F9, Open the Options tab on the upper bar. 3. Go down to General and open it. You will see a table called Editor Options. 4. Among the editor options you will see [ ] Visible tabs and another one which is [ ] Visible trailing spaces among others. These are of course on if you see an x inside the brackets, like this [x] and they are off if there is only [ ] so you switch these either on or off according to taste and then exit with save by hitting the OK option. Thus, it would seem to me that this gives you what you need. Apparently you do not want to have these invisible characters under any circumstances so just turn them off. Unfortunately, it does not solve *my* problem which is that it is so difficult to turn them on or off that it is disruptive. Thus, I continue to wish for an option to turn on and off, which would let the human editing the file to see the invisible characters but cause them to be invisible to the mouse. As to your statement But paste-ability must take precedence over your special example, because it's a more basic operation. I am in fact not Editing files, or copying pieces of what you are editing to some other place? Me, I spend more time with editing the files. And if what I am editing is code, which is often the case, then I really do not want the hidden characters to be turned off and no way to turn them on. That would render relatively useless an editor which I have come to rely on for much of that work, which would make me unhappy.. No. My requiremet trumps yours. The most primitive requirement is UNIQUE. All further fancy-facilities are merely ONE of an infinite fad posibility. In law and common sense, drinking water may be a human-right; tea, coke...whisky is not. True enough. But I bet that I am not alone in saying that the editor is in your sense more primitive than the mouse. Look at history. Which came first? The editor? Or the mouse? Which was a more basic need for the development of the modern computer? The editor? Or the mouse? Some, I believe, would think that your statement about further fancy-facilities applies more appropriately to the mouse, not to the editor. I have known a lot of people who thought that, and some of them have hardly been geeks at all, just ordinary users who wanted to get work done. It is good to keep that in perspective and not to get too dogmatic about whether modern feature X of a computer is more essential than modern feature Y. Sometimes _both_ X and Y have their appropriate uses and the best approach of all is to make sure that X and Y do not clash and interfere with each other and/or cripple some really nice and useful feature of the other. But all of that is by the way. In the present circumstances what I understand is that you want tabs and spaces to be invisible at all times because they get in the way of mouse-copy or mouse-paste. In the mcedit config options, there is indeed a way to turn them off, which would seem to solve that problem for you. Cheers, Theodore Kilgore ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
Re: mc Digest, Vol 102, Issue 3
On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, Mueen Nawaz wrote: chris glur crg...@gmail.com writes: -- 2. The ghost tabs and ghost single space characters are not transferred anywhere else when mouse-paste is done You mean an exta comminication between the mouse-paster and the editor? Such complications are to be avoided. We already have them. You have to shift click to copy and paste with the mouse. Should we get rid of that as well? Actually, it seems to me that is a good question. There may be a good reason for needing to use the shift button, but what is the reason, exactly? Just curious. But perhaps someone knows. OTOH, to hold down the shift key is rather easy. The question of switching invisible characters on or off is not a mere holding of the shift key. The procedure for such switching is sufficiently long and involved that it would be really inconvenient to use it more than once a day. (Thinking out loud: Hmmm. Possibly a script to do this could be mapped to some weird key combination, maybe Cntrl-Alt-shift or something else that's weird) I have a good old friend who detests syntax highlighting - he did most of his programming before they became popular. Many people consider a spell checker bloat. Good examples. I do regard spell checkers as bloat. None of them can actually be trusted. For example, some spell checkers probably do not know that both calendar and calender are words, while some other better spell checkers might have been taught that both of them _are_ words. But to have one of the better spell checkers which knows that both of these are correct spellings is in itself no help at all. A calendar is hung on the wall. A calender is used while manufacturing paper. There is no context in which both spellings are correct. Oops. How many other examples of this problem are there? Many. One might start with its and it's. Again, in any given context at most one of the two can be correct. You have to realize that you're arbitrarily drawing a line as to what's acceptable and what's artsy. Anything beyond Edlin's capabilities is artsy to some. Indeed. That was part of my point. Another part would be that some people might consider even the presence of a mouse to be artsy. One does have to be careful about such matters. Especially, leaders of big projects need to be more careful. For example, not all design decisions taken from on high both in KDE and in Gnome about how a desktop environment is supposed to work have been universally popular. Some of those decisions have not always meshed well with the work flow and work habits and expectations of too many of their users. Sometimes, the response has been that the problem lies with those users who just can not understand what is good for them. Such an attitude seems to have worked well enough for Microsoft, but Linux desktop projects cater to a very different clientele. I understand that there is an option to turn these ghost characters on, or to turn them off. GOOD! Show me how ? In the editor, press F9, go to Options and then General. Then outside of the editor go to Options and Save Setup - this will ensure the behavior is saved for future Midnight Commander sessions. Right. More detailed explanation in my reply. Given that it can be turned off, is there still a problem here? I can understand it would be a serious usability issue if one can't and your grievances would have a lot more weight, but I think it's fine as it is as long as the user can choose it. I suppose one could argue which should be the default mode. As I said, I would wish for a third option. Namely, that I can see the invisible characters, but the mouse will not turn them into visible characters if I use it to copy something. Most ideal of all, of course, would be that it copies them while preserving their fundamental, invisible but functional nature. Perhaps it really would be too difficult to write the code which can do this. But, hey, I can still wish. No. My requiremet trumps yours. The most primitive requirement is UNIQUE. All further fancy-facilities are merely ONE of an infinite fad posibility. And some of those fancy-facilities is why people use Midnight Commander. Indeed. There are after all other file managers, especially related to the big desktop projects for example. I don't think that I have ever seen a one of them which works so well and I am not interested in using them even in the X environment. Also, I'll add that Midnight Commander lets you use a different editor if mcedit doesn't suit your needs, which makes things much more flexible for the user. Also true, of course. And one can even hard wire this as an option in the configuration for MC, too. [...] (cute story, BTW. I don't teach astronomy, but I do teach mathematics and I can see things like that from both sides of the desk)
