On Thursday 19 May 2016 07:50:32 deloptes wrote: > Felmon Davis wrote: > > On Wed, 18 May 2016, Felix Miata wrote: > >> Lisi Reisz composed on 2016-05-18 16:40 (UTC+0100): > >>> 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. > > > > 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. > > Lisi, > "tab" is coming from the maps with tabs AFAIK - from the paper world. This > is a normal process in language(s) to use the description of something old > for something new with similar function. > Some are horizontal, some are vertical. > The relation between the tabulator button and the tab/folder is however not > clear to me. And to me it is a mere convention that we use ALT+Tab to > switch between application windows, CTRL+PgUp/PgDn to switch between tabs > in firefox and Shift+right/left to switch between the konsole windows. > However similar to the languages, if convention is already there, it is > usually hard to change, because people get use to it. > This given as argument, I see the option for Felix to change it himself ... > there are many ways to do so. I don't quite see why this is addressed to me by name. It is not my argument!!! :-/ I merely pointed out that one can produce a rational argument for up/down. (I don't think, mind you, that rationality comes into it.) If Firefox is pitched against Konsole, I instinctively stick up for TDE against Mozilla. And left-right is in fact more instinctive to me. But one can produce a rational argument for up/down. Lisi