Re: PBX alternative?
Re: PBX alternative?
- Subject: Re: PBX alternative?
- From: Peter Sichel <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 10:15:36 -0400
At 10:43 AM +0200 7/16/02, Georg Tuparev wrote:
On Tuesday, July 16, 2002, at 09:38 AM, Julian Barkway wrote:
That may be but it is almost impenetrable for those who have never
used it. At least PB's editor
has the advantage of being intuitive so that you can concentrate on
the task at hand rather than
having to waste time memorizing arcane key-sequences (or referring
to crib-sheets...)
Is it too much to expect that a person willing and able to learn the
power of Cocoa is also willing to invest half hour on completing the
tutorial of a powerful source code editor - an investment that will
pay off within days? And Xemacs has all bells and whistles kids are
crying for...
I remember when this same debate was raging within Digital 15-20 years
ago as DEC came out with some of the first visual keypad editors.
The debate was finally settled by a carefully designed human
factors study that revealed a surprising result:
Many people who use advanced or complex features of their
editing environment (like specialized keyboard shortcuts)
think they are fast when in fact they are not. It takes
more mental processing time to choose these arcane commands.
Common things like moving with the arrow keys or a mouse, typing,
and delete should be simple and fast because these are what people
use most.
Beyond this, it is beneficial to make an editor customizable
and scriptable so users can adapt the tool to their own style
and tasks to be performed.
Notice the mouse in particular is a Fitz Law device (positioning
time is proportional to distance and size of target). While there
is some time lost moving your hand between the mouse and keyboard
(depending on your technique), the mouse itself is very efficient
(about as good as it gets).
I seem to remember you can customize PBX to use a different editor
such as BBEdit if you wish (or at least you could in CodeWarrior).
I haven't tried this yet because the built-in one is good enough.
- Peter
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