Talk:561: Well

s[he] be[lie]ve[d]141.101.98.124 14:40, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

why Psychoticpotato (talk) 16:35, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Shouldn't we elaborate on the questioned superiority of DVORAK? --129.206.196.49 20:45, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Actually, QUERTY was not designed to avoid jamming keys. It actually seems to be based on morse code mappings - to suit the majority of early users who were morse code operators. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249/?no-ist 103.22.201.159 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The final two frames appear to be foreshadowed by the title text within Connected (http://xkcd.com/807/) Lakeside (talk) 19:02, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I like how the 'uncomfortable truth' for the man is that he never meant it when he said 'I love you', but for the woman, it's that she always did! 108.162.219.223 23:47, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

What is ironic is that I am setting up a keyboard based on Michael Dicken's optimizer. Also, while I prefer vim (light weight!), I also have Xemacs out of my own choice. Greyson (talk) 20:37, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

The uncomfortable truth is that both emacs and vi are quite difficult to learn, just in different ways.

Emacs, after you learn it, allows you to write the highly flexible macros for the text processing but requires to type some very long command names to do most things. Being largely written is Lisp, historically Emacs had also been very slow and memory-hungry but with the modern computers it doesn't matter any more. Oh, and Emacs messes up the proper Tab characters, replacing them with spaces.

Vi doesn't have this flexibility but has a built-in set of commands extremely well suited to editing the programs. Vi is well-suited for the remote administration because it works well even over the very slow and high-latency connections and allows to do everything with just the alphanumeric keys, thus working even when the handling of the function keys (including arrows ans such) was not set up correctly. One of the newer versions of vi, vim, allows to do some very extensive programmable text manipulation, getting closer to Emacs in this respect; and vim can be set up to mess up the Tab characters just like Emacs. 108.162.246.5 21:58, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

vi is the hell, my keyboard doesn't have a META key... Maybe it's ALT, or ALT+CTRL,... ALT+SHIFT, or ALT+SHIFT+CTRL+ESC+...A hell. But you can rely on vi, it's available on every UNIX based system. So, if you just have a simple Telnet or SSH login you have to figure out how vi does work. --Dgbrt (talk) 23:30, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Meta means alt. So M-E would be Alt-E.

The Firefly explanation is too much, especially with the point about airing out of order. I think with the inclusion of Randall's personal preference for Firefly, and its frequent reference by Randall, it would make a lot more sense. flewk (talk) 08:07, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

The voice in the last panel is clearly coming out of the well, as is the case in Well 2. It's not Megan saying "I love you" unlike the current explanation. 141.101.107.228 21:06, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

"A common myth states that this was done to slow typists down; this was not the case." Is that really a common myth? I've never heard about it. I've only ever heard about the jamming thing which, as pointed out in the explanation, seems to check out. Bischoff (talk) 08:05, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

I removed that part. Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 12:48, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Except that it really is(/was/(is/was) supposed to be) commonly known (or 'known', incorrectly). And the Wikipedia page for QWERTY actually does say "Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down, but rather to speed up typing." That's practically the same sentence.

Maybe new people like the above just aren't paying attention enough to encouter the myth (whether or not they believe it, or ar told that it is wrong), but I don't believe it has become so significantly uncommon as to no longer bear repeating here to explain the context of the 'unconfortable truth' of the alternative not being better and the 'facts' that say otherwise being wrong.

There are still adherents to Dvorak (or other) keyboards, of course, and I imagine that those who have trained themselves to use one don't actually have it worse on either physical or on-screen, but the debate goes on (and was certainly active a decade and a half ago). 172.70.163.120 14:28, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Point taken. I just never heard of that (and unlike "to prevent mechanical jamming" it doesn't really make sense). It's still not relevant for the explanation of the comic, though. Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 15:12, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

LOL Emacs is anything but "user friendly" 162.158.79.113 14:20, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I've used VI since day one, and I've never used Emacs. It's user friendly, it just takes practi... wait. NanoMan2000 (talk) 14:56, 22 December 2021 (UTC)