[Python-ideas] Accessible tools

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Andrew Barnert writes:
 > On Feb 18, 2015, at 16:50, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
 > 
 > > Emacs is a paleolithic design which has recently had GUI features
 > > grafted on to it,
 > 
 > Not exactly recently; it goes back to version 19--as in 1992-ish
 > for Lucid and Epoch, 1994 for GNU. In fact, many people think the
 > reason it's GUI features are so strange is that they were grafted

Right.  The paleolithic *design* didn't change, so Emacs is stuck with
a neolithic GUI.  XEmacs is a little bit better on both grounds, but
not much.

 > they're stuck with a weird paradigm that goes back to the days
 > before the GUI wars.

But we don't consider that we're "stuck"; we *like* text-oriented
interfaces<wink/>  (And they're probably easier for screen readers to
express effectively.)

 > An awful lot of people use vim from the console.

Of course they do, that's not the point.  The point is that because
VIM is *self-contained*, it won't have access to the level of
internals of the IDE (it's the IDE that's central here) that Emacspeak
has with CEDET and the Emacs redisplay (that latter is probably the
deciding factor).

 > Another is that its command sequences are designed to be typed
 > without looking at the screen or moving your hands from normal
 > touch-type position.

Now there's a biggee for this use-case!  Emacs does have an answer,
though: VIPER (vi keystroke bindings).

Whether all that adds up to enough potential to make Emacs use
palatable to someone who isn't already an Emacs user is the question I
guess.