Flutterby™! : Muscle Memory 2005-04-15 14:16:51.590066+00

Muscle Memory

2005-04-15 14:16:51.590066+00 by ebradway 8 comments

I'm writing my first "real" code in about three years. I stuck in VBA-land writing an extension to ESRI ArcGIS 9 to produce cartograms. The enviornment is both good and bad. I finally started to split the window and noticed that I keep pressing ALT-Up Arrow to try to switch to the window above. I haven't used BRIEF in almost a decade...

But, yeah, I'm finding all sorts of muscle memory as I move over to the Mac. It's less of an issue since I'll probably be weaned over to the PowerBook and I'm guessing Charlene will start pestering me for my laptop sometime soon, but I'd love to find a keyboard that's the same key-spacing and function remapping layout as my laptop, so I can let all of those muscles settle on one layout.

I remember a Dan line from approx: 1993. "If I could play guitar like I used Brief I'd be Jerry Garcia".

Which leads to a real problem in 'interface design' - Although their are subtle differences in guitar fretboards, they are very uniform from instrument to instrument (Yes, I know classical vs acoustic vs electric). Even more uniform are "piano" keyboards.

Is it time for the computer industry to standardize on such things for computers and software? Hmm... Microsoft has done a lot to standardize some things there. (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V for example) - but I'm not sure I want things to 'stick' with Qwerty keyboards and scroll mice forever and ever. But the issue remains.

WHat is amazing is how my brain has learned to shift modes between my laptop (WinXP) and Desktop (Linux) and keyboards and keystrokes. The really adaptable interface remains: Us.

Instead of Alt-UP Arrow, I have to take my hand off the keyboard and use the mouse, then go back and type...

Alt-Up Arrow was switch to the frame immediately above (frames rather than windows because they only tiled, a frame could hold a view on the same document or a different one).

In Emacs

"Ctrl-X o" switches to the next frame (I had to type that to remember it, which tells you something about muscle memory), but it's to the next frame, not to the one in a specific direction, so sometimes it can take several of those to get to the buffer you want.

I'm not sure if Macs have something comparable but on Windoze, depending on how the application is coded, Ctrl-Tab should get you to the next [child-]window/frame.

command-backtick cycles through the windows of the current app. Add shift to cycle the other direction.

Speaking of emacs, I've got a thing a friend wrote that'll do what C-X o does, but in the opposite direction. Very handy with lots of split buffers.

#Comment Re: made: 2005-04-18 19:08:57.320091+00 by: ebradway [edit history]

Yeah! I found it here. F6 switches split panes in the VB environment. Now to retrain all those muscles...