[Python-ideas] Accessible tools (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Thu Feb 19 09:13:53 CET 2015

Andrew Barnert writes:

On Feb 18, 2015, at 16:50, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Emacs is a paleolithic design which has recently had GUI features grafted on to it,

Not exactly recently; it goes back to version 19--as in 1992-ish for Lucid and Epoch, 1994 for GNU. In fact, many people think the reason it's GUI features are so strange is that they were grafted

Right. The paleolithic design didn't change, so Emacs is stuck with a neolithic GUI. XEmacs is a little bit better on both grounds, but not much.

they're stuck with a weird paradigm that goes back to the days before the GUI wars.

But we don't consider that we're "stuck"; we like text-oriented interfaces (And they're probably easier for screen readers to express effectively.)

An awful lot of people use vim from the console.

Of course they do, that's not the point. The point is that because VIM is self-contained, it won't have access to the level of internals of the IDE (it's the IDE that's central here) that Emacspeak has with CEDET and the Emacs redisplay (that latter is probably the deciding factor).

Another is that its command sequences are designed to be typed without looking at the screen or moving your hands from normal touch-type position.

Now there's a biggee for this use-case! Emacs does have an answer, though: VIPER (vi keystroke bindings).

Whether all that adds up to enough potential to make Emacs use palatable to someone who isn't already an Emacs user is the question I guess.

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