Re: feature request for stand-alone info

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 10:17:14PM +0200, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> 
> On Fri, May 12, 2017, at 20:44, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > In my opinion, the ability in Info to move the cursor independently
> > of scrolling the node is unnecessary and confusing.
> 
> Hear hear!
> 
> > When a user tries
> > typing Down at the start of a node and the cursor moves down one line,
> > that is fairly useless:
> 
> That is somewhat of an understatement.  :)
> 
> > they probably wanted either to scroll the node
> > or to move to the next link. I expect that it is too late to change 
> > this, however.
> 
> I think that most users of info will be delighted when <Down> finally
> does what they expect it to do: *scroll*.  (And if they expected it to
> jump to the next link, they now immediately know that they will have
> to use a different key for that.)

> So no, it's not too late to make info do the right thing.

If we forget about what Info does already, and ask what the "right 
thing" is, what's the answer? What's the most intutitive and powerful
interface? Up and Down to scroll the page and Tab and S-Tab/M-Tab to 
move between links?

I looked at the Lynx web browser and it uses Up and Down for both 
scrolling and moving between links. It will only scroll if there are no
more links on the currently-displayed part of a page. Maybe new commands
'move-to-next-xref-or-scroll' and 'move-to-prev-xref-or-scroll' could
be bound to the arrow keys?

> The best would be to let scroll-behavior affect also also the down-line
> and up-line commands, and bind those by default to the arrow keys.

This would be an easy change to make, but some people might hold down 
Down to go to the end of the node but not want to go to the next node.
Any change could be confusing and disorienting for people who are used
to the current behaviour.