Re: Firefox hate

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From: Chris Devers
Subject: Re: Firefox hate
Date: 23:51 on 13 May 2005
On Sat, 14 May 2005, Juerd wrote:

> Chris Devers skribis 2005-05-13 18:06 (-0400):
>
> > You ever want to beat the person who set that convention ?
>
> No, [Q]uit and [W]indow make some kind of sense

But that's the thing! They don't!

At first glance, the mnemonic seems to make literal sense, and this in
turn makes the keystrokes seem appealing defaults.

But if you look at the standard [American] QWERTY layout, the problem
with having these two variant actions sitting next to each other like a
firecracker and a land mine is obvious, and clearly insane.

I'd have been happier with keys that were less "obvious", but also less
dangerous to people with occasionally sloppy finger memory.

> I still don't quite like [Z]undo, [X]ut, [C]opy and [V]aste.

I think of the X/V ones as pictographs rather than literally:
"cutting" is like crossing-out the selection, and "pasting" is telling
the computer to put the contents of the buffer "right down here".

As for Z, it's not a mnemonic in any way, but I actually memorized that
one because the act of setting things back to how they were before the
most recent injustice happened kind of reminded me of Zorro and his "Z"
slice in the sand/tree/etc. I'm positive that this wasn't the intention
when selecting that key, but it made sense to me... :-)



-- 
Chris Devers
There's stuff above here

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