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Text editing hates you too (2019)

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#21

Post by ptr »

Steltek wrote: post #20
breischl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>selection of text + pasting of a link as "turn this text into a link using the URL in the clipboard" Seems like an interesting UX debate. It's a handy shortcut, but it makes "paste" modal depending on what's in the clipboard. Pasting might replace the selected text, or might link it. And because the behavior depends on whether the clipboard text "looks like" a URL, there's an element of DWIM (Do What I Mean) in ther…

I haven't experienced the behavior described but reading it, I instantly hate it. It would differ from every other program I use. I'd counter with there should be two different paste actions in every program: plain and smart. I almost always don't want to preserve rich formatting when I paste text. It looks like my cat walked over the keyboard while I was typing. The action to paste as plain text versus a fancier/DWI…

Slack does it, and I had it happen to me once. It was unexpected and added extra frustration when I was already stressed.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#22

Post by ska »

Steltek wrote: post #20
breischl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>selection of text + pasting of a link as "turn this text into a link using the URL in the clipboard" Seems like an interesting UX debate. It's a handy shortcut, but it makes "paste" modal depending on what's in the clipboard. Pasting might replace the selected text, or might link it. And because the behavior depends on whether the clipboard text "looks like" a URL, there's an element of DWIM (Do What I Mean) in ther…

I haven't experienced the behavior described but reading it, I instantly hate it. It would differ from every other program I use. I'd counter with there should be two different paste actions in every program: plain and smart. I almost always don't want to preserve rich formatting when I paste text. It looks like my cat walked over the keyboard while I was typing. The action to paste as plain text versus a fancier/DWI…

This is why you eventually end up with Word's paste modifier icon....

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#23

Post by geenew »

oblio wrote: post #17
slver wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

And then we discovered that not only English speakers want to use PCs.

Didn’t extended ASCII cover that and make text terminals usable with non-English character sets? Genuinely curious.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#24

Post by slver »

crazygringo wrote: post #18
slver wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

No, things are as hard as they need to be. Fixed-width ASCII terminals didn't work for virtually anyone except English-speaking users. Turns out the entire world needs to use computers. That's a "need". Not "allowing".

It depends how big you think. Dealing with status quo, things like text direction are necessary complication.

But at a higher scale it’s purely incidental complexity: you only need one direction for all languages. All languages are linear. No language uses direction to encode meaning. Direction in language is just “stuff starts one place and ends in another”.

Balkanization of the encodings is not a good thing. Imagine if every city had a different color for a traffic stop light. Why not? Maybe it’s a matter of cultural pride. What if every country had its own network protocols? Imagine what a nightmare internet would be.

But thankfully we had common sense in few cases. In many others we don’t.

And Unicode is full of incidental complexity itself. Did we really need skin color emoji. Who is yellow here? Anyone being brightly yellow perchance? No. We had the perfect abstract color for emojis.

But now we have to deal with this shit.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#25

Post by deckard1 »

Regarding the vertical cursor movement, back in the day there was an alternative behavior. You can see this in QuickBASIC/QBasic[1]. Here, Microsoft treated the entire screen as a grid. I always thought that was a great UI. It hides the fact that there are line endings (\n on Unix or \r\n for DOS). And why shouldn't it? That's an implementation detail. And as evident by DOS using CR+LF it goes back to the days where you had an actual physical carriage on a typewriter. Nearly every modern text editor you have to type out the spaces/tabs you want to reach the area you what to add text. In QBasic, you just move the cursor wherever you want on the screen with arrow keys and start typing. Because, unlike a typewriter, a computer screen is 2D. Vim has block mode but, AFAIK, can only work on selections. Of course, this is not universal and only works with monospace fonts in certain languages. But back in the day it made it easy to create ASCII/ANSI diagrams and art.

Modern text editing is a multilayered mess. Rendering, input methods, variable width fonts, and the special codes (markdown, etc.). On some sites it's not even self-consistent. Take Jira. Last I checked, they have one editor for creating a ticket and an entirely different editor for editing that same ticket[2] (one of these editors sucks more than the other, but I can never remember which... but neither one is remotely what I would consider a "good" interface). How they got there is truly the 8th Wonder of the World.

[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_qbasic_megapack

[2] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/H...

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#26

Post by skrebbel »

geenew wrote: post #23
oblio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then we discovered that not only English speakers want to use PCs.

Didn’t extended ASCII cover that and make text terminals usable with non-English character sets? Genuinely curious.

How would you use extended-ascii to write Arabic?

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#27

Post by zaptheimpaler »

slver wrote: post #24
crazygringo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, things are as hard as they need to be. Fixed-width ASCII terminals didn't work for virtually anyone except English-speaking users. Turns out the entire world needs to use computers. That's a "need". Not "allowing".

It depends how big you think. Dealing with status quo, things like text direction are necessary complication. But at a higher scale it’s purely incidental complexity: you only need one direction for all languages. All languages are linear. No language uses direction to encode meaning. Direction in language is just “stuff starts one place and ends in another”. Balkanization of the encodings is not a good thing. Imagin…

?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#28

Post by tonyedgecombe »

bombcar wrote: post #4

For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.

Strings, dates, floating point, even true and false are messy in some languages.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#29

Post by slver »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #27
slver wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends how big you think. Dealing with status quo, things like text direction are necessary complication. But at a higher scale it’s purely incidental complexity: you only need one direction for all languages. All languages are linear. No language uses direction to encode meaning. Direction in language is just “stuff starts one place and ends in another”. Balkanization of the encodings is not a good thing. Imagin…

?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS

> ?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS

So you just said all non-English speakers use right-to-left? No, the direction isn't what's confusing me, rather the fact you're trying to score a cheap outrage comment, but actually wrote non-sense no matter which direction you read it.

How about maybe educate yourself a little, and rephrase your question to reflect reality, and we can have an intelligent conversation about it.

Most of the world uses left-to-right and top-down (yes look around when you go out and notice all the vertical logotypes in English around the city). Right-to-left is relative minority. If you have democratic thinking and we gotta vote for it, the winner is obvious. Yet, I'd rather learn to read fluently English in right-to-left than the current mish-mash of "whatever".

Also read about Korean. It was a top-down right-left language, today it's written left-right. People are surprisingly adaptive, you know, it's supposedly our top advantage as a species. No one is born with "right-to-left" grafted in their DNA. We honestly gotta tone down the ignorance in these discussions.

My native language isn't English, by the way. And I don't mind adapting.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#30

Post by tonyedgecombe »

slver wrote: post #14
bombcar wrote: post #4

For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

Only if you didn't leave the US. Over in Europe (and I assume Asia) it was a constant source of problems.
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