19 May
2016
19 May
'16
6:21 a.m.
On Wed, 18 May 2016, Felix Miata wrote:
Lisi Reisz composed on 2016-05-18 16:40 (UTC+0100):
wow! people are really taking a metaphor very seriously! someone calls
a bit of coding a 'tab' and that generates an argument about whether
the coding should look like a book!
as I vaguely recall there were similar scholastic arguments about the
metaphor of a 'desktop' or 'folders' and such.
these arguments are as difficult to settle as the dispute Swift
recounts of the quarrel between the 'Big-endians' and 'Little-endians'
in _Gulliver's Travels_! and that was causa belli!
(itself a parodic mirror of the dispute between 'Catholic' vs
'Protestant' in Ireland, well of course this wasn't purely
theological....)
say here's what we do: let's code 'tabs' so they go up and down the
right or left side for the 'Up-endians' and so they go along the
bottom or top for 'side-winders'!
I'm a 'side-winder' myself but will willingly concede the word 'tab'
to the 'Up-endians' if they insist - what's in a name?
but my fellow side-winders will insist on their metaphysics: tabs are
'really' left-right, after all some books have tabs at the top or
bottom so....
f.
--
Felmon Davis
"Don't tell me I'm burning the candle at both ends -- tell me where to
get more wax!!"
Jan Stolarek composed on 2016-05-18 17:33
(UTC+0200):
> As for Ctrl+Up/Down for tab switching to me
this is counter-intuitive.
> Tabs
> are displayed horizontally. Using keys for vertical movement to switch
> between them does not make much sense to me.
This is why an alternate tab switching option employed in other apps includes
the tab key.
Did you ever use a real tab, such as sheets in a ring binder or pages in a
printed manual? Those tabs are each an extension of a layer constituted of
one or more pages. Even today, paper manuals often use pseudo-tabs, pages
with contrasting colors at different positions on pages' ends to correspond
to different chapters, e.g. my Magnavox DVR and Brother printer.
They are numbered 1,2,3,4 etc. One usually
regards numbers as going up and
down.
Not so much that as the physics of real rather than virtual tabs. Yes, they
look like they are horizontal, but each real tab is attached to a layer. Each
can overlap one or more others, completely hiding them. One goes up and down
through anything that is layered, unless the whole layered stack is stood on
end, in which case movement within layers in the stack becomes fore and aft,
not side to side.