Aucbvax.4218
fa.editor-p
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people
Sun Oct  4 21:16:38 1981
meta flames
>From dlw@MIT-AI Sun Oct  4 21:14:49 1981
In response to your challenge, here are some thoughts about designing
user interfaces for novices versus designing them for experts.

I think that we can and should design user interfaces suitable for
everybody.  Emacs does a pretty good job of this, although it could be
better.  Some people have said "having an editor with a lot of commands
confuses novices".  I disagree; I think that you can start out a
beginner with a small subset of the commands and simply not mention the
others.  The only real problems are caused by the users's accidentally
typing advanced commands that put them into modes where it is unclear
how to escape; the interface could be improved to make it easier to get
out of such modes, or there could be a beginner's switch that disables
certain commands.  (I understand that the latter is available through
an Emacs library.)

Use of Control-N for "Next line" and Control-B for "Backward" and even
Control-A for "beginning of line" are easy to learn.  To learn these
commands is a matter of a bit of rote memorization, somewhat aided by
the choice of characters (B is for Backward).  Since you get extremely
quick and interactive feedback when you use the commands, the learning
is reinforced strongly.

What makes it hard to advance in learning Emacs are the occasional
inconsistencies and complexities.  The command set is not as symmetrical
as it could be.  That Control-U is almost but not quite the same as
giving a numeric argument of four is unnecessarily confusing; in fact,
the philosophy behind Control-U, which sometimes works as a numeric
argument and sometimes works as a random modifier, is not very good.
This seems to be rooted in history (the TECMAC editor, one of the
important fathers of Emacs, had this, too), and it could be fixed were
there a complete redesign.  In a redesigned command set, there might be
more prefix characters, or a general re-think of how prefixes and
modifiers work, intended to be more consistent and simple.

Coming up with a consistent user interface for the functionality of full
Emacs is a time-consuming job.  Emacs's present functionality was
need-driven and it grew incrementally; naturally the user interface
shows signs of history and growth, and is not as good as it could have
been if the designers had had perfect foresight.  However, it is important
to note that it COULD be done better, and that the result would come close
to the goal of being equally suited to novices and experts.

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