Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Finally, to come back to the keyboard interface, I think WordStar is the least modal word processor I have ever used. On long-hand paper, writing and editing are one fluid task: there's no barrier to discourage you from switching between adding new material and modifying existing material. On a typed page, these tasks are quite distinct, especially with non-electronic typewriters. To change a word is a completely different spectrum of activities, and therefore a completely different mindset, from simply adding new words.

The thing is, Microsoft Word (for Dos and then Windows) was actually a big step for this also. The standard Windows/Macintosh arrow-key-and-selection-area interface was huge step up from previous word processing. The thing is that as author says, previous word processors like WordPerfect preserved faithfully and horribly the typed-page-and-whiteout "interface". I wrote a number of college papers in WordPerfect and I found it's "modalism" terrible (though I'm sure some is nostalgic, someone found advantages).

Moreover, the select-copy-paste system is based on a few simple tools that can be grasped without special training and synergize to produce just about any edit effect. Things weren't that easy before and I don't miss that.

One thing I'd mention is that graphic editing (photoshop/GIMP/etc) is still stuck in an interface taken from paper. And that when CorelDraw and Inkscape showed a better interface that also uses a few synergizing tools, other software failed to adopt it. But the pressures on graphics software seems to be different.

>One thing I'd mention is that graphic editing (photoshop/GIMP/etc) is still stuck in an interface taken from paper. And that when CorelDraw and Inkscape showed a better interface that also uses a few synergizing tools, other software failed to adopt it. But the pressures on graphics software seems to be different.

As someone who has only used these applications briefly, I would love to know more about this.

Illustrator is functionally identical in this respect, if you're more familiar with the adobe family.

I think the claim is the an interface that revolves a bunch of different tools being applied to the image (e.g. the Lasso, Pencil, Paint, Eraser, etc. tools on the toolbar) is imitating paper. I don't know what the better alternative is.

It depends upon what you are starting with and what you are trying to accomplish. In times past, what you were doing the image editing on also mattered.

Programs like CorelDraw and Inkscape treat anything you draw as an object. If you want to draw a circle, it stores the parameters of the circle (e.g. position, radius, colour) in memory rather than a rasterized version of it. If you want to create a circle that looks like a sphere, you may draw a second circle inside the first circle to serve as the highlight, then connect the circles using a blend to create the gradient effect. If you don't like the position of the highlight, you move the second circle and the blend will be automatically adjusted. If you don't like the colour, you select each circle and adjust the colours. Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to colours. The circle could contain bitmap to end up with a textured sphere. The second circle doesn't have to be a circle either. It could be a crescent shape. I used to create some amazing looking alien planets using these techniques. You don't have to limit yourself to primitive shapes either. Graphics tablets digitize a number of different parameters for strokes. You could create a stroke with the pencil tool, then modify a parameter of that stroke so it looks like it was created by a calligraphy pen or a paint brush.

That description implies an intrinsic limitation: it's greatest utility is in image creation. You could store modifications to a pre-existing raster image in a similar way, but it is not quite as useful. For detailed images, it is also CPU and memory intensive. That's not a huge issue today, but it was a huge issue when people were initially developing the standard image processing techniques.

As far as I remember, Inkscape is pretty similar to Illustrator. What do you mean by "synergizing" in Inkscape?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com