kyle@xanth.UUCP (06/19/87)
> You can say that you work better with control keys, or that you work better > with function keys, but not that "control keys are better" or > "function keys are better". I disagree. The placement (and number!) of function keys varies far too much from terminal to terminal for a programmer and user to agree on how to make best use of them. A user can certainly get used to using function keys, but if he uses more than one kind of terminal, he's likely to not have the same number of functions keys, same sized function keys or even same shaped function keys. This goes for those 'arrow' keys as well. I've seen users, who upon finding themselves on a terminal without arrow keys, are lost at sea because they never learned the 'h', 'j', 'k', and 'l' cursor motion commands in vi. Now if you're damning your software to one particular kind of terminal then I guess you afford to use every misbegotten key the terminal manufacturer decided to put on the terminal. Otherwise you're better off using control-sequences. I've seen the control-key in some awful places on a few terminals but I can rely much more on its position (and its very existence!) than I can those function and arrow keys. kyle jones <kyle@xanth.cs.odu.edu> old dominion university, norfolk, va
guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris) (06/25/87)
> I disagree. The placement (and number!) of function keys varies far too much > from terminal to terminal for a programmer and user to agree on how to make > best use of them.... > Now if you're damning your software to one particular kind of terminal then I > guess you afford to use every misbegotten key the terminal manufacturer > decided to put on the terminal. Otherwise you're better off using > control-sequences. Well, that depends. The issue was whether control keys or function keys provide a better user interface. Under many circumstances, a user will be using the same type of keyboard most of the time; for some users, under these circumstances some users may be more productive using function keys than control keys. If you have an editor that permits you to bind various character sequences to functions, you can set up key maps that permit you to use function keys *without* having to hardcode knowledge of these function keys into the editor. Again, absent any evidence that the vast majority of people work "better" (for some definition of "better") with control-character commands than with function-key commands *in their native environment* (i.e., assuming that everybody will have to work with many different kinds of keyboards is right out; that assumption is simply not valid), the blanket statement that "control characters are better than function keys" is simply not true. If you have a very wide range of terminals, in a situation where users won't be able to use the same sort of keyboard most of the time (e.g., if you have a public terminal room with a wide variety of terminals, and no private terminals), control keys may be better because "learning" the function keys helps only when you are typing at a particular terminal, and that only happens a small fraction of the time. If you have a private terminal with a reasonable function-key layout, and you have a tendency not to move your pinky in time, so that ^X-n becomes ^X-^N often enough that it gets in your way, and you're reasonably proficient at learning how to find the function keys without looking, function keys may be better than control keys because you make fewer errors. Guy Harris {ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy guy@sun.com