Re: Info tutorial is out of date

[Miles Bader <miles.bader@necel.com>]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:
>     I think the term "shortcut", while common among the GUI set, actually
>     does do some harm by subtly encouraging people to think of menus as the
>     "standard" way of doing things.  For that reason, it really should only
>     be used in applications where that is indeed true, not in applications
>     like Emacs where it is most certainly not true.
>
> Why do you say "menus"? I didn't. I mentioned menus and links and "using
> `M-x'". I don't think of key bindings as shortcuts for just menu
> access.

Perhaps not, but that's _exactly_ how the term shortcut is used in the
GUI toolkits from which you clearly got the term (and thus the sense in
which most people that know what the term means will interpret it).

> In Emacs, they are shortcuts for commands, whether `M-x <command>' or
> menu access or even macro execution. They are, in fact, "keyboard
> shortcuts" for longer ways of doing things.

No they are not.  Commands and bindings are different things.  A binding
is not a shortcut for a command, because they are entirely different
sorts of things.

To say A is a shortcut for B implies that: (1) A and B are both
essentially the same type of action, (2) that B is in some sense the
more "normal" / proper / advertised / whatever, and (3) that A is
somehow quicker / easier than B.  There's also typically an implication
that A, while quicker than B, is also "less proper" / quick-and-dirty /
etc.

[You could say that a key binding is a shortcut for M-x command-name,
but that's a bit dodgy, because M-x command-name is not in most cases
the conventional way of invoking commands -- so it depends on the
specific command whether.]

These nuances seem fairly obvious to me.  I presume that you are a
native English speaker, but perhaps you're so immersed in the windows
world that the term shortcut has lost it's conventional connotations for
you.

-Miles
-- 
`...the Soviet Union was sliding in to an economic collapse so comprehensive
 that in the end its factories produced not goods but bads: finished products
 less valuable than the raw materials they were made from.'  [The Economist]