Re: Proposal to improve the nomenclature of scrolling directions

[Eli Barzilay <eli@barzilay.org>]

40 minutes ago, Nix wrote:
> 
> Compared to what XEmacs's scroll-in-place has to do (basically a
> rewrite of the entire scrolling code, in Lisp, and it still doesn't
> entirely work) it is enormously better. 99% of the work is delegated
> to the original scrolling code.

Yeah, that was the main thing I liked about this.

I already emailed Stefan and said that not only is it small since it
leaves the real work where it belongs, having it in the core is going
to make it even smaller since large parts of the code are dealing with
the usual work that is needed when a very basic command changes.  If
it becomes a customization option of the scrolling commands, then none
of that is needed.


> I'm honestly not sure how anyone can tolerate Emacs's default
> scrolling behaviour -- I've used something like scroll-in-place for
> my entire life with Emacs, the default was so hard to handle.

I actually started without it, and I can say that a few short minutes
of using the in-place thing made me wonder how I could ever tolerate
the default...


> I can't imagine that anyone actually *wants* page-up/page-down
> sequences to leave you in a different place from where you were
> before, but Emacs users are conservative old sods so it is likely
> that a lot of users prefer it. So the default should surely not
> change.

:)


> > It could also be used to let the user go back to where she was
> > before scrolling (to simulate those other editors where point is
> > not moved to stay visible while scrolling, so that non-scrolling
> > commands teleport you right back to where you were).
> 
> Ah. That's an interesting variation. Controlled by (setq
> scroll-in-place 'unmoving) perhaps? (It should probably hide the
> cursor while it's conceptually offscreen as well, on terminals where
> that's possible, by flipping cursor-type to nil. Alas this would
> make it vanish from non-selected windows too, if
> cursor-in-non-selected-windows is t...)

(This sounds like something that would be harder to do, since there
are lots of things that relate to the point position which would
break.  Maybe a better way to do that is some specific event loop
while scrolling that aborts before any other key is processed, but
that would make the code different.  But what do I know...)


> I have a copyright assignment on file, and my employer (Oracle)
> signed a disclaimer long ago. I'm not sure about Eli. (Cc:ed.)

I've done it when I was a student in Cornell, I'm not sure that it
still holds.  I obviously don't mind if it's used in any way.

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