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Aucb.158 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Thu Dec 10 13:22:25 1981 Moran's Comments >From Guy.Steele@CMU-10A Thu Dec 10 13:20:38 1981 Tom, Your remarks are well-taken and very interesting. It may be of interest to observe (with negative pride on my part) that the EMACS command set was also designed, as far as I know, with no thought at all to touch typing; as far as I know, none of the designers are even touch typists! I am considered amazingly fast for a hunt-and-pecker, but I must occasionally glance at the keyboard. Therefore, while I haven't made accurate measurements, I greatly suspect that hitting the same key several times is faster than any other within hand sequence because I can do it without looking. This is particularly important if I am, say, moving over words until I reach a point I am looking at (which is often easier than mentally counting the words and giving a numeric argument, unless the load average is ridiculously high). Indeed, this is one of the greatest problems I have with the Meta-C, -U, -L command set: those three characters are rather separated, so leaning on the Meta key and bouncing among those three takes time because of up-and-down glances between keyboard and screen. If the keys were contiguous I might not need to look. On the other hand, I don't feel as handicapped as I might without a Meta key to lean on, because indeed my left hand can hit ESC while the right hand is still hunting for the next key in the sequence. All this is quite subjective and anecdotal, but perhaps these thoughts may prove useful? (At least EMACS, unlike QWERTY, wasn't intentionally designed to *impede* touch-typing!)

By the way, I got up to Yale recently and got to play with Z, and I want to put in a good word for it. The rectangle stuff is quite nice, and the mouse-like but mouseless cursor positioning is a true wonder to behold with a skilled operator at the keyboard. --Guy

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