[racket-dev] intro videos

15 minutes ago, Guillaume Marceau wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> > Yes -- paredit is exactly an attempt to get the always-balanced
> > benefits of structured editing, without an actual structure editor.
> 
> Yes, but paredit still gets its priorities backward. You want to
> have the most commonly used edit operations on the easiest chords
> (or without any chord at all, if you are trying to avoid RSI.) In
> paredit, keystrokes to edit sexp are heavily chorded, and keystrokes
> to edit single-characters are simple, even though single-char only
> occur when fixing typos in identifiers, which is quite rare when
> using auto-completion.

I'm sorry, but this is a completely nonsensical complaint.  paredit
does not have any priorities of its own here, it is simply using the
same exact key (-chords) that are used by default on Emacs.  I guess
that you can say that it has a priority: follow the standard Emacs
keys.  Given that it *is* an Emacs extension, doing anything other
than this would be insane.


Case-in-point:

> Case-in-point,
> Moving forward by one sexp in paredit is CTRL-ALT-F (ouch). In
> DivaScheme it's just L.
> Moving forward by two chars in paredit is RIGHT, RIGHT. In DivaScheme
> it's W, RIGHT, RIGHT

if paredit would have used vi-style modes, it would have been dead and
burried years ago.  In fact, *you* said that DivaScheme "wasn't very
popular with the healthy-wristed".

I appreciate the potential pain etc that people with RSI go through,
but this is completely unrelated to what paredit does.  Keeping it
separate is important -- this way, you need one solution for structure
editing and another for dealing with RSI -- and the only requirement
on both sides is that they compose well.  (In addition, RSI is not the
only problem that affects keyboard use.  What about different keyboard
layouts?  Different input devices?)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!