Consistency of user experience or Contra-zenclavier
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:date: 2005-11-26T00:04:00
:category: computer
:tags: vim, outliner

(Answer to discussion caused by my `message on
gmane.comp.editors.vim.outliner about creating Kate syntax highlighting
file for VimOutliner`_).

Probably it is just brain damage of mine caused by many years of using
Windows, but somehow even after couple of years of using vim it still
feels very strange and unfamiliar. However, discussion cannot be made
around feelings, so here are some rational (or semi-rational) reasons,
why I begun to think a lot about leaving vim.

I guess that you are a programmer (or some other CS-guy—why would you
edit Common Lisp scripts?) and so the most of your time is spent editing
plain text in a text editor. That is not my case, and I found myself to
spend bigger and bigger proportion of time in some kind of KDE
applications—KMail, KNode, LyX (OK, it is not KDE-based yet, but with
similar user interface), Konqueror, which is probably the reason that
even when I was editing plain text files (Python source code, R-scripts,
different XML files) it felt better when I did it with kate (BTW,
talking about XML files, kate’s XML plugin is probably the only
comparable environment for editing XML files to Emacs’s PSGML I’ve met
so far). It seems to me that more and more I work with KDE it is more
and more difficult to achieve satori (I guess you have already read
`“Zenclavier: Extreme Keyboarding” by Tom Christiansen`_, it should be
obligatory reading for any vi-geek) and contrary to the Tom’s article it
was more and more simple to achieve it working with KDE programs. As if
the most important condition of the satori is not the best design of the
computer program (and there could be much said about clever design of
vi—Tom has already wrote it), but uniformity of the user experience. It
doesn’t mean, that there are many ways how to screw up design of a text
editor (for example, no one explained me well, what are toolbars good
for editing texts), but that the design is not everything. When you
achieve relatively good design (and of course all main text editors for
Linux and many other for Windows or Mac did it) then the familiarity can
kick in and you can achieve oneness with your computer.

This leads to some rather strange conclusions. If the homogeneity of
environment is the most important requirement, then the best Desktop
environment is the one which provides the most homogenous user
experience (which is IMHO one of the reasons why OS/2 failed and why
Linux achieved competitivness with Windows for general public IMHO only
in the last couple of years, although both desktop environments were
much better in terms of their window managers, background philosophy
etc. for many many years already). True, I have never tried GNOME hard
enough in the last years to make any reasonable comparisons (so this
should not be understood as a shot against GNOME in the KDE-GNOME holy
war), but it seems to me that KDE is currently the best desktop
environment on Linux (and not only on Linux???) in terms of its overall
homogeneity. For each application which makes KDE you can probably find
a comparable or better alternative (although sometimes you have to
search really hard—for example, KMail and Konqueror are just bloody good
programs in themselves), but each of these alternatives leads to the
special world of their own not that much consistent with anybody else (I
have to note though that I almost never use KOffice, which could change
balance towards OpenOffice.org and GNOME for others). Mozilla programs
are one world for itself, Emacs and GVim are kind of addictive drugs
closing ones’ mind to anything else, and closeness is probably present
pretty much in OpenOffice.org as well.

And then there are some just plain technical reasons why I am getting
worried about any dependency on GVim—see for example `this thread`_ or
`the thread I have originated in comp.editors`_. No, and `I don’t think
that yzis is the answer`_.

.. _`message on gmane.comp.editors.vim.outliner about creating Kate syntax highlighting file for VimOutliner`:
    http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.editors.vim.outliner:964
.. _`“Zenclavier: Extreme Keyboarding” by Tom Christiansen`:
    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/zenclavier_1299.html
.. _`this thread`:
    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.user.kde/13562
.. _`the thread I have originated in comp.editors`:
    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.editors/76Vjb7dT6D0
.. _`I don’t think that yzis is the answer`:
    http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.editors.yzis.devel/522