For me, it allows the cursor to serve as a temporary bookmark: if I need
to, I can examine another part of the document, then start typing and immediately jump back to what I was working on.
Makes sense. But if this is the intended use case, I don't think its well supported by the arrow keys. The arrow key behavior should be consistent with paging and scroll the viewport one line at a time, instead of jumping back to where the cursor is. Seems like there would be times where what you are interested in is between two "pages" so you need to finely scroll to get the relevant section all on the screen at once.
If I need to edit something after paging, I'll probably want to use the
mouse anyway to move the cursor, rather than stepping through with the arrow keys to the right line and column.
Yea, I guess my usage is very different :) I never want to use the mouse. Rather than stepping through one char at time with the arrow keys, I use ctrl-arrow to jump words and home end to move to the beginning end of the line - its usually only a few key strokes to position the cursor.
I hadn't really considered the temporary bookmark functionality, and I think it has its merits (if it were better supported with the arrow keys I might even use). But, I'm hard pressed to come up with enough scenarios outside of programming (eg. refer to method signature, start typing) to justify the lagging cursor as a good global Mac default. I guess I'm starting to rant, so I'll sign off - thanks :)
On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Kevin Reid kpreid@switchb.org wrote:
On Jan 30, 2011, at 16:10, Patrick Cullen wrote:
It seems to me that the primary use case when you scroll to a new location
in an editable document is to "start editing", so it would be logical for the cursor to follow along. Is there some UI interaction pattern / use case that I don't understand?
For me, it allows the cursor to serve as a temporary bookmark: if I need to, I can examine another part of the document, then start typing and immediately jump back to what I was working on.
If I need to edit something after paging, I'll probably want to use the mouse anyway to move the cursor, rather than stepping through with the arrow keys to the right line and column.
-- Kevin Reid http://switchb.org/kpreid/
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