[Mac OS X TeX] Re: The role of TeXShop

[flip phillips]

As was pointed out, the 'spacebar' tradition dates back to the earliest 
versions of 'more', i am fairly certain (at least back to my initial BDS 
unix days in '82) that is its origin.
and more importantly, as many of you who use emacs probably already 
know, Mac OS X text windows support emacs key bindings for navigation 
out of the box (a NeXT legacy). You can control-N, P, etc in almost any 
cocoa window and navigate (as I'm doing in this Mail window right 
now...). Mathematica has these bindings built it and has for many 
versions now. They aren't there out of necessity, but of convienence- 
some of us have emacs navigation programmed in our spine at this point 
(as I have vi latently hiding out there too).

I haven't used the arrow keys for editing since EDT (10 points to those 
who can name that editor/os :) but don't mind having them. similarly, 
those of you who have never touched emacs  aren't really effected by the 
latent navigation in OS X windows either....

just $0.02 rambling

by the way the cmd-] and cmd-} stuff is a little backwards from the 
editors i'm used to (alpha, code warriors IDE) for indenting and 
commenting... :)

On Friday, January 18, 2002, at 10:46  AM, Tom Kiffe wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Norman Gray wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Lorenz Szabo wrote:
>>
>>> On 2002-01-17 10:16 AM, "Joachim Kock" <kock at math.unice.fr> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think it
>>>> works in all web browsers (and most likely comes from unix (more or 
>>>> less))
>>>
>>> Although Mosaic was developed on NeXT, I don't know any Unix program 
>>> using
>>> the Space-bar for scrolling
>>
>> Joachim's `(more or less)' was a rather sly joke.  `more' is the
>> traditional Unix file viewing program, and `less' is a version of
>> `more' with more features (less is more); thus folk would use these
>> programs continually, every day.  Both use the spacebar to page down
>> through a text.  This means that the association spacebar-pages-down
>> is _deeply_ ingrained in Unix folk, so that it's much more natural than
>> using the PgDn or arrow keys.  As a result, numerous other applications
>> use this key, along with delete-pages-up, when displaying read-only 
>> text.
>> xdvi and ghostview are notable examples in this context.
>>
>>> By the way: Even Adobe's Acrobat Reader 5
>>> doesn't support the Space-bar.
>>
>> ...most confusingly, and irritatingly.
>>
>> Before anyone else points it out, yes, vi doesn't use
>> spacebar-pages-down, but (a) vi is well known to be unusual, and (b)
>> vi users have a completely distinct set of keyboard instincts to page
>> in anyway, so it hardly matters.  This is not relevant to the current
>> discussion.
>>
>> To keep this posting on-topic, I for one would prefer to see an OS X
>> application maintain an option to enable a `traditional' Unix
>> interface, such as spacebar-pages-down.  The Mac is now talking to two
>> different communities at the same time: trad-Mac people with rightly
>> strong opinions about what constitutes a good interface, but also
>> trad-Unix folk, with rather different learned expectations about
>> comfortable interfaces.  The Mac really needs to address both groups'
>> expectations.
>>
>> My own pet peeve about using TeX on OSX is that, not only does Preview 
>> not
>> notice that a .pdf file has changed and so reread it, but there seems 
>> no
>> way to reload a .pdf file short of closing a Preview window and issuing
>> `open file.pdf' again.  Acrobat is no better.
>>
>
> MacGhostViewX automatically rereads both Postscript and PDF files. 
> Leave the
> document open at a desired page, process the file, and bring 
> MacGhostViewX
> to the front. The document will redisplay at the same page.
>
> Tom
>
> ******************************
> * Thomas Kiffe               *
> * Department of Mathematics  *
> * Texas A&M University       *
> * College Station, TX 77843  *
> *                            *
> * Phone: (979)845-7335       *
> ******************************
>
>
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