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Refactoring editor for English

I'd like an editor or word processor that understands enough English grammar to do intelligent refactoring, as can already be done in Java by things like IntelliJ.

For example, when I edit a sentence like this:

Please call Jack_; it's important that he be there.

it should automatically adjust the case when I change the object:

Please call Jack and Jill_; it's important that they be there.

There are grammar checkers that can detect the inconsistency but I don't know of any that will automatically fix it as you type.

Much more complex examples are possible.

posted Sat 23 Oct 2004 in /software/ui | link

Summary of Principles for User-Interface Design

Summary of Principles for User-Interface Design by Talin. Many other people have written similar things, but this is a pretty good brief summary.

posted Wed 3 Sep 2003 in /software/ui | link

Consistency and friendliness of mozilla -remote

Tim complained about the way that Mozilla really likes to reuse the browser process already running on your screen, even when you try to start another instance. This can be troublesome if, for example, you want to run a different version of the browser, or run one from a remote machine, or su'd to a different userid. "It's just not Unixy," he said, "to open a window in an existing process when I asked it to start a new one."

(Incidentally, using the -ProfileManager option you can get a second process running. You can't run more than one on the same profile at the same time, presumably for reasons to do with locking, although I guess it could be resolved if it was commonly desired.)

Of course from the regular user's point of view, the system works pretty well: you can just invoke browsers whenever you want and the second and later windows do run faster. I seem to recall back in Netscape 4.x and earlier you had to do something tricky with netscape-remote or you got a warning about locking.

These days, now that machines are getting big and Mozilla is getting relatively fast, I wonder if it would be feasible to just run everything in separate processes.

I did imagine how this would have worked six years ago, when Mosaic used more than half the RAM on typical machines: while you're waiting ten minutes for the machine to finish thrashing, you could get a Unix guru to explain why this is a good idea.

posted Mon 14 Jul 2003 in /software/ui | link

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