Re: arrow keys vs. C-f/b/n/p

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 11:16 PM, Lennart Borgman
<lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 11:05 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>>> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
>>> Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:07:36 +0200
>>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>>
>>> >  abcde EDCBA xyz
>>> >  ---------
>>> >
>>> > Now, what characters do you think should be displayed with the region
>>> > face?
>>>
>>>
>>> As I said in another message it would be "abcde CBA", i.e. exactly the
>>> visual region that you now get when moving with the arrow keys so that
>>> you get to C.
>>
>> But that doesn't make sense: the cursor traverses characters that you
>> don't paint in the region face, and the region face is put on
>> characters the cursor didn't move through.
>
> So you are going to sit there painting them one by one just to be sure?


I must admit that your point here makes more sense than I first thought.

I looked a bit at how things are setup in OpenOffice. The default
seems to be that arrow keys follows logical direction (and I could not
find how to change it, but it should be possible ... ;-).

They seem to have discussed this three years ago so I started
wondering why they left it this way. Clearly, it is not hard to see
the advantage of letting arrow keys move visually so what big win did
they see having them move logically.

I wonder if your point here, is the main advantage. The reason I
suspect this is that moving with the arrow keys shifted is the only
way to select text there. And during this operation you might more
often actually read the text.

So here actually (to my surprise) "reading is (quite often) cursoring".


Still, for other operations, I think that the reverse visual direction
for the arrow keys is bad.