From: djohnson@cs.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.editors,alt.religion.computers,alt.religion.emacs
Subject: Re: scroll up/down
Date: 9 Jan 93 22:36:59 GMT
Followup-To: comp.editors
Distribution: inet
Organization: =CSE Dept., U.C. San Diego

>There's GOT to be a reason to choose one frame of reference over another.

Well, what if one reference uses "scroll" and the other uses another
word?  For "scroll-up" I imagine the text moving upwards on the screen,
as if it were being scrolled by (ala player piano, etc).
Now if it were "page-up" I would not find it hard to imaging a different
thing happening, such as the window into the text moving up.

>   Ok, here's a good reason for preferring vi's way over emacs's: when
>you're in a scrolled window in a GUI and you click on the down-arrow
>in the scrollbar, what happens?  You move down through the document!

Hmm, I bet you're still in your twenties :-)  Imagine using a GUI
as an analogy for something!  (I've only been 30 for a month, and
I'm still boggled)  The people that wrote emacs didn't have GUI's
as a reference, and very few other screen editors to steal ideas
from.  "Scroll-up" was a very appropriate analogy back then.

>The same if you drag the block in the middle of the scrollbar
>downward.  Do any of you think this is ambiguous or counter-intuitive?

*Only* because I have used scroll bars in their common setup for
so long, *not* because it is a natural way of doing things.  (ie,
when the bar moves up and down, is the window moving over the text,
or the text moving under the window?)  Since the window does not
*look* likes it's moving, it would seem natural to imagine that
the text underneath is moving (and moving the text UP gets you
closer to the bottom of the text).

>How about the PageUp/PageDown keys on many keyboards?

"Page" is not the same as "scroll" - and I think that's 99% of the
confusion.

>How about the
>up-arrow key -- what word-processor ever used it in any way to do
>what scroll-up does?  Would you expect Shift-UpArrow to move to the
>beginning of the document, or the end?

This is a moot point.  People DO NOT type "scroll-up" in emacs, they
use a key stroke instead.  All you need to know is Control-V is down,
and Meta-V is opposite.

>   It seems to me that there's a very strong convention of moving
>"down" meaning moving to a later part in the text; i.e. the observer
>is moving, not the text.

Uh, emacs should change because all the new squirts on the block
decided to use different names?  And even if emacs changed, it's
not big deal, since no one ever types in that function name unless
they've reached the point where they won't get confused.

Next there will be this silly argument that "execute-extended-command"
should be called something else, since that isn't the name VI uses.

>I just think that for the sake of intuitiveness and consistency,
>the names scroll-up and scroll-down should have been chosen the other
>way.

At the time, picking either way would NOT have affected consistency
since there was not much to be inconsistent with.  And the intuitive
argument is invalid.
-- 
Darin Johnson
djohnson@ucsd.edu
    "I wonder what's taking Guybrush so long..."
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