Re: Proposal to improve the nomenclature of scrolling directions

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Dani Moncayo writes:

 > Therefore, we should find a general solution for this.

There's only one "general solution": prohibit from using Emacs all
those people who disagree with your intuition of what's moving.  I've
seen this discussion several times on both the XEmacs and Emacs lists,
and the end is always inconclusive.  The best you can do is simply
choose a consistent terminology, accepting that a large number of
people will never agree.  AFAIK that's already been achieved, by
choosing more or less arbitrarily[1] what makes sense to RMS.

FWIW, for me personally "view" has no useful semantics here.  It
simply indicates a visible region of the buffer.  "Scroll" means the
buffer content moves "in the view".  The idea that the view moves
makes no sense to me because of the ergonomics: moving view means your
eyes have to move, while moving content brings the content to your
focal point.  Also, in "scroll-view" the word "view" is redundant,
because scrolling implies that the view is restricted.  Net results is
that "scroll-up" should mean content "below" the view should "move up"
into it.  So my intuition agrees with current Emacs practice.

Since I agree with current practice, it's a weak test but I believe
this doesn't actually matter.  My fingers know what to do regardless
of the name.



Footnotes: 
[1]  At best a poll was taken, but surely no proper ergonomic study
was done!