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Re: Why are <next> and <prior> not called <page down> and <page up>?


From: Lennart Borgman
Subject: Re: Why are <next> and <prior> not called <page down> and <page up>?
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 07:08:55 +0200
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 (Windows/20060719)

Stefan Monnier wrote:
Thanks, but then we are talking about different levels.  You refer to
a technical level.  I am more interested in what the user sees, the
physical keyboard.  I think it is easier to understand and remember for
users if we refer to the physical keyboard.  This is also very
standard today.

But here you're bumping into a core design guideline of Emacs, which is to
make things as transparent as possible: the internal names are generally
both used internally (of course) and made visible to the end user.
So changing the end user side will have impacts on the internal side as
well, so it can't be changed as easily as you may think.

Whether that's good or bad is up to you, but it's a bit late to change it,
The principle to have things as transparent as possible is a good one, but so is to use understandable names for end users.

What is needed is a translation from the internal symbol names to physical keyboard key names in `single-key-description'. Such a translation should of course be possible to turn off.

Do you think this is a very big change? Does it disturb the transparency very much?




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