The Inhumane Interface

nearthespeedoflight.com

1 point·jbrennan··3 comments

Er, sorry, could someone explain why this is bad UI? I frequently want to delete in both directions, and delete a selection. Seems efficent and sensible to me. In fact, I find Macs are almost impossible to use for text editing because of their "nonstandard" behavior in this regard. Oh, the home/end shenanigans.

I believe it's bad UI because Text Selection is marking a range of text for manipulation (like copy, move, style changes, etc.). Of course, you might also like to erase the text, in that case you can use the Delete/Backspace key.

But to have any key also function as 'Replace all this text', when you're solely in a text manipulation mode just seems like a destructive action, where it wasn't explicitly commanded by the user (it might be explicit if you've experienced the behaviour before, but consider a novice user). I can't think of a good way to rationalize this to a novice user.

I should have clarified in the article about this. I will add this clarification to my article.

Ah, I read "any key" as referring to the delete/backspace keys. In retrospect it makes perfect sense.

To be honest, I still consider this efficient and consistent. Deletion and replacement are both operations that can be applied to selections. For that matter, so is applying a regex, but I'm revealing too much about my editor preferences to have any stake in "sensible UI". ;-)

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