[TxMt] Re: cursor doesn't follow page up / down

[Patrick Cullen]

 > 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 at 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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