From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Michael Toomim Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date) Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 16:00:00 -0700 Sender: emacs-devel-admin@gnu.org Message-ID: <3CC5E770.9060108@cs.berkeley.edu> References: <87vgal3w79.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <87vgak30cw.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <7263-Mon22Apr2002224014+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1019602868 8807 127.0.0.1 (23 Apr 2002 23:01:08 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 23:01:08 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Eli Zaretskii , xemacs-design@xemacs.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org Return-path: Original-Received: from quimby.gnus.org ([80.91.224.244]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1 (Debian)) id 1709HY-0002Hw-00 for ; Wed, 24 Apr 2002 01:01:08 +0200 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([199.232.76.164]) by quimby.gnus.org with esmtp (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 1709Iw-0000UG-00 for ; Wed, 24 Apr 2002 01:02:34 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=fencepost.gnu.org) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 1709HO-0007Gn-00; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 19:00:58 -0400 Original-Received: from front2.mail.megapathdsl.net ([66.80.60.30]) by fencepost.gnu.org with smtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 1709GN-0007AP-00 for ; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 18:59:55 -0400 Original-Received: from [216.36.77.18] (HELO cheeseskin) by front2.mail.megapathdsl.net (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 3.5.8) with ESMTP id 27585044; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 15:53:47 -0700 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=cs.berkeley.edu ident=toomim) by cheeseskin with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1709GS-0000Ov-00; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 16:00:00 -0700 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020412 Debian/0.9.9-6 X-Accept-Language: en Original-To: Brady Montz Errors-To: emacs-devel-admin@gnu.org X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.9 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Emacs development discussions. List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:3141 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:3141 Brady Montz wrote: > Yes, can't have clippy. I much prefer a passive approach where > everything is unobtrusively at your fingertips over clippy's obtrusive > sticking fingers in your eyeball. I just want to point out that the "software agent" approach (which is the HCI research term for what clippy is an instantiation of) is already quite ubiquitous in the XEmacs interface. For instance, if I type M-x some-command-with-a-keybinding, XEmacs will say "Hey, you could do that faster by just using C-x M-foo S-bar C-M-S-xfoobar". This is just the same as the way clippy tells you shortcuts for doing repetitive tasks, and it's really very useful. Software agents are a great idea... clippy is just a little too obtrusive and has way too much personality (nobody like's a microsoft personality). I say, don't stray away from UI ideas because they are "like clippy". You can have UI features that are remarkably similar to clippy, and remain great features.