Should Text motion commands have no menu entry?

Should Text motion commands have no menu entry?

[Vaidheeswaran C]

I was looking at the http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/ hoping to
get some inspiration for my "Emacs Primer".  Man of the text
navigation commands do NOT have a menu entry.  Is it a deliberate
decision? If not, can the situation be changed.


| The most basic buffer movement commands move point (the cursor) by
| rows (lines) or columns (characters):
|
|
|    C-f  Forward one character     C-b  Back one character
|    C-n  Next line     C-p  Previous line
|
|
| Here are some ways to move around in larger increments:
|
|    C-a  Beginning of line     C-e  End of line
|    M-f  Forward one word     M-b  Back one word
|    M-a  Previous sentence     M-e  Next sentence
|    M-v  Previous screen     C-v  Next screen
|    M-<  Beginning of buffer     M->  End of buffer

To the above list, I will also add paragraph and page navigation
commands.

Re: Should Text motion commands have no menu entry?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Vaidheeswaran C <vaidheeswaran.chinnaraju@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 18 May 2015 01:48:57 +0530
> 
> Many of the text navigation commands do NOT have a menu entry.  Is
> it a deliberate decision?

AFAIR, it was never even considered, probably for the simple reason
that no other similar program offers such menu items.

The only ones I see in the likes of gedit, notepad, and (gasp!) Word
is "Go To Line" by number, and Emacs does have that in its menus.

Re: Should Text motion commands have no menu entry?

[Vaidheeswaran C]

On Sunday 17 May 2015 08:20 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> The only ones I see in the likes of gedit, notepad, and (gasp!) Word
> is "Go To Line" by number, and Emacs does have that in its menus.

Does Notepad (or any of the other editors) support motion by sentences
and paragraphs and pages?  Is it possible they have no entries for
these because they don't support it?

Re: Should Text motion commands have no menu entry?

[Yuri Khan]

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 8:31 AM, Vaidheeswaran C
<vaidheeswaran.chinnaraju@gmail.com> wrote:

> Does Notepad (or any of the other editors) support motion by sentences
> and paragraphs and pages?  Is it possible they have no entries for
> these because they don't support it?

Word and LibreOffice Writer do support motion by pages and a few other
things. LibreOffice does not have menu entries for these by default,
but has three small toolbuttons below the vertical scrollbar. (Word
does not even *have* a menu since the advent of the Ribbon interface
in 2007.)

The LibreOffice Writer Help has an index entry named “Shortcut Keys
for LibreOffice Writer”, which lists keys for moving by character,
word, line, paragraph and screen page, but not keys for these
medium-distance jumps. The Customize dialog reveals that they are not
bound to any keys by default. (But Customize is an advanced feature
that can both alter key bindings and add menu items.)

I vaguely recall that Word bound medium-distance jumps to something
like Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn and that binding was modal — it jumped by pages by
default, but you could click a button and choose another object type
and it would jump by those objects thereafter.

Re: Should Text motion commands have no menu entry?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 18 May 2015 08:01:59 +0530
> From: Vaidheeswaran C <vaidheeswaran.chinnaraju@gmail.com>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> On Sunday 17 May 2015 08:20 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > The only ones I see in the likes of gedit, notepad, and (gasp!) Word
> > is "Go To Line" by number, and Emacs does have that in its menus.
> 
> Does Notepad (or any of the other editors) support motion by sentences
> and paragraphs and pages?

Yes.

> Is it possible they have no entries for these because they don't
> support it?

No.

Re: Should Text motion commands have no menu entry?

[Yuri Khan]

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 2:18 AM, Vaidheeswaran C
<vaidheeswaran.chinnaraju@gmail.com> wrote:

> I was looking at the http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/ hoping to
> get some inspiration for my "Emacs Primer".  Man of the text
> navigation commands do NOT have a menu entry.  Is it a deliberate
> decision? If not, can the situation be changed.

Menus have two functions:

* The executive function allows users to invoke a command if or when
they forget its keybinding or command name.

* The discovery function alerts users that a certain command exists,
and tells them its keybinding.

Menus also have a cost:

* As the number of menu items grows, the menu as a whole becomes
harder to grasp.

For cursor motion commands, especially such fine-grained ones as
“forward-char”, the executive function of the menu is very
inefficient. No one in their right mind will perform cursor motion by
repeatedly choosing e.g. Edit | Go to | Next character.

The discovery function is also diminished. Everybody knows that a text
editor *does* have cursor motion commands, and expects them to have
certain keybindings. (These happen to be arrows and editing-block
keys, not the supposedly super-efficient C-f C-b C-n C-p C-a C-e C-v
M-v. This does not actually matter.)

Additionally, the discovery function of the menu is duplicated by the
context help, which is called by F1 m in Emacs, and in other
applications usually by F1 followed by navigating the help index.

In the name of reducing the cognitive cost of the menu as a whole,
ubiquitous commands — such as cursor movement and instances of
self-insert-command for each of the 1114112 Unicode codepoints —
should not have corresponding menu items.

Re: Should Text motion commands have no menu entry?

[Vaidheeswaran C]

On Sunday 17 May 2015 09:09 PM, Yuri Khan wrote:

> Everybody knows that a text editor *does* have cursor motion
> commands, and expects them to have certain keybindings

A RJH like me discovered paragraph and page motion commands in later
years.  I find them very helpful for quick navigation.  I wish I had
discovered them earlier.