Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Ilya Zakharevich]

On 2010-07-08, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> and so on.  The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
> better.  Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
> order to get around that.

I suspect that you wanted to say that you find this situation
disagreeable.  Just think about that: would this opinion of yours
persist if Word had a clearly documented way to switch off guessing
(completely, and/or per particular heuristics)?

> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness.

Partially, this is true.  But only at a small part (like M$'s
stupidity in not making the guessing optional).  The major thing which
you are missing is that the escalation also happens in `having people
get what they wanted in the first place' (usually "getting the work
done").  (Although users-conditioning-via-designer's-cluelessness also
takes place - hmm, this is just another way to state the same as you did...)

> The more userfriendly a piece of software becomes, the more this
> becomes a problem for _competent_ people willing to learn about
> their tool.

BS.  There is no direct connection.

> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
> documentation.

Just don't.  (Addressed in another message in this thread.)

Yours,
Ilya