The editor war is the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi text editors. The rivalry has become an enduring part of hacker culture and the free software community.
A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation. In many applications, GUIs are used instead of text-based UIs, which are based on typed command labels or text navigation. GUIs were introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces (CLIs), which require commands to be typed on a computer keyboard.
A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software. Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to change files such as configuration files, documentation files and programming language source code.
In computing, a modifier key is a special key on a computer keyboard that temporarily modifies the normal action of another key when pressed together. By themselves, modifier keys usually do nothing; that is, pressing any of the ⇧ Shift, Alt, or Ctrl keys alone does not (generally) trigger any action from the computer.
Jef Raskin was an American human–computer interface expert who conceived and initiated the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s.
The dialog box is a graphical control element in the form of a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response.
In user interface design for computer applications, a modal window is a graphical control element subordinate to an application's main window.
Canon Cat is a task-dedicated desktop computer released by Canon Inc. in 1987 at the price of U.S. $1,495. On the surface, it was similar to dedicated word processors popular in the late 1970s to early 1980s, but it was far more powerful, and incorporated many unique ideas for data manipulation.
In computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or application program, or it may have been written by the user in a scripting language. Some integrated keyboards also include pointing devices; the definition of exactly what counts as a "key" sometimes differs.
In computing, a zooming user interface or zoomable user interface is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less, and browse through different documents. Information elements appear directly on an infinite virtual desktop, instead of in windows. Users can pan across the virtual surface in two dimensions and zoom into objects of interest. For example, as you zoom into a text object it may be represented as a small dot, then a thumbnail of a page of text, then a full-sized page and finally a magnified view of the page.
An information appliance (IA) is an appliance that is designed to easily perform a specific electronic function such as playing music, photography, or editing text.
Common User Access (CUA) is a standard for user interfaces to operating systems and computer programs. It was developed by IBM and first published in 1987 as part of their Systems Application Architecture. Used originally in the MVS/ESA, VM/CMS, OS/400, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows operating systems, parts of the CUA standard are now implemented in programs for other operating systems, including variants of Unix. It is also used by Java AWT and Swing.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human–computer interaction:
The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems (ISBN 0-201-37937-6) is a book about user interface design written by Jef Raskin and published in 2000. It covers ergonomics, quantification, evaluation, and navigation.
In computing, incremental search, also known as hot search, incremental find or real-time suggestions, is a user interface interaction method to progressively search for and filter through text. As the user types text, one or more possible matches for the text are found and immediately presented to the user. This immediate feedback often allows the user to stop short of typing the entire word or phrase they were looking for. The user may also choose a closely related option from the presented list.
Sprint is a text-based word processor for MS-DOS, first published by Borland in 1987.
In user interface design, a mode is a distinct setting within a computer program or any physical machine interface, in which the same user input will produce perceived results different from those that it would in other settings. Modal interface components include the Caps lock and Insert keys on the standard computer keyboard, both of which typically put the user's typing into a different mode after being pressed, then return it to the regular mode after being re-pressed.
Aza Raskin is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and of the Earth Species Project. He is also a writer, entrepreneur, inventor, and interface designer. He is the son of Jef Raskin, a human–computer interface expert who was the initiator of the Macintosh project at Apple.
GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement. Its tag line is "the extensible self-documenting text editor."
Emacs, originally named EMACS, is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on its direct descendant, GNU Emacs, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.1, released July 2023.
