Comment by jancsika
7 years ago
> Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly, and I fear that in the name of making "everything work everywhere", we're going to compromise a bunch of apps that worked beautifully on one platform in favor of making them work adequately on several platforms.
Which are the Linux GUIs that currently "work beautifully" on the desktop?
> I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"
You couldn't just hook up a usb keyboard to the Purism phone?
You may have missed that part where I said "Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM".
My point was not someone simply running vim on their phone. My point was that if someone rewrote vim to be idiomatic within the smartphone UX (e.g. replacing keyboard motions with swipes and gestures), it would largely defeat the purpose of vim as a modal editor and render it simply as another generic text editor.
> idiomatic within the smartphone UX (e.g. replacing keyboard motions with swipes and gestures) it would largely defeat the purpose of vim as a modal editor
i'm not convinced that's true... you're right that presently most touch interactions are very "direct" (i.e. an object will move exactly like you drag it, much like using a mouse). but that doesn't rule out more "abstract" (i.e. vim-like) methods of touch input, we just haven't seen them yet. "10 fingers on a keyboard" will always be more expressive than two thumbs on a screen for input like this because it offers more bandwidth and isn't limited by screen real estate, but i feel there's still a lot to explore w.r.t. touch gestures, even if they end up as keyboard shortcuts on steroids.
one example of a good "abstract" gesture is what Paper 53 (an iPad drawing app) did (does?) for undo: put one finger down, drag another finger around it in a compasses-like motion; counter-clockwise to undo, clockwise to redo, and the further you turn, the more "steps" it moves. felt really intuitive and way better than tapping an undo button!