Sender: garbinat@lsesun10 (Benoit GARBINATO)
From: garbinat@lse.epfl.ch (Benoit GARBINATO)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
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Organization: Laboratoire de Systmes d'Exploitation (LSE)
Subject: Stone Age text editing in VW 2.5
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Message-ID: <321422a7.0@epflnews.epfl.ch>
Date: 16 Aug 96 07:26:31 GMT
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Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!newsfeed.pitt.edu!gatech!news.mathworks.com!enews.sgi.com!news.sgi.com!swrinde!howland.erols.net!surfnet.nl!swsbe6.switch.ch!swidir.switch.ch!epflnews.epfl.ch!garbinat

I work at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where we
have a site license for VisualWorks on Sun Solaris 2.x. I just installed
new version 2.5.1 (available on the web), and I am very disappointed to see
that the essential function keys (copy/cut/paste/undo/...) are still not
working on Sun Type 5 keyboard, as far as text editing is concerned.

I have been working with VisualWorks on Solaris 2.x since version 1.0 and
it always amazed me that such a well-designed environment has such a poor
support for text editing, especially for function keys and keyboard
shortcuts. This is very surprising, since this support exists within the
canvas editor (as documented in appendix E, p.11 of the VisualWorks 2.5 User
Guide, rev. 2.0). And it is even more surprising for version 2.5, since
Release Notes point out that all tools (including browsers, debuggers,
etc.) have been re-implemented as VisualWorks applications.

Well, I then ask some support from ParcPlace-Digitalk in Germany, but the
guy there told me: ``Sorry, we did not support the Function keys of any
platform. Many of our customer created their own solutions for this
issue.'' I was not very happy with that answer, as you can imagine.

Ideally, I reckon that there should be a panel in the Settings tool
providing the ability to customize shortcuts, i.e., to interactively
bind a particular control/escape/meta key sequence to a menu item.
Meanwhile, I think it would be very little effort for ParcPlace-Digitalk
to make those shortcuts available everywhere in the environment (for the
perfect Keyboard Settings tool, I am prepared to wait a little bit ;-).

My experience with VisualWorks taught me that it is a **great environment**
and I really enjoy working with it. As far as text editing goes, I have been
using the emacs_keys.st file-in from the Smalltalk Archive (which is a
great website, BTW!) up to version 2.0.  This file-in worked perfectly with
version 1.0, had a few very annoying bugs with version 2.0, and simply
doesn't file-in with version 2.5, since many classes have changed or
disappeared. However, I have never seen a satisfactory support for function
keys and shortcuts from ParcPlace-Digitalk itself, yet.  I think it is time
that VisualWorks comes out of the Stone Age as far as code/text editing is
concerned ;-).

If other people share the same feelings about this problem, I reckon it
would be a good idea to inform ParcPlace-Digitalk. Only this way there
might be a chance to make things evolve.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Benoit Garbinato
Operating Systems Laboratory           (LSE)	e-mail:	garbinato@lse.di.epfl.ch
Computer Science Department            (DI)	phone:	+ 41 21 693 52 74
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology  (EPFL)	fax:	+ 41 21 693 67 70
CH-1015 LAUSANNE 
(Switzerland)
