Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar

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DonHopkins · 2022-01 · Strong recommendation

Previous HN discussion about that video: [LINK] [VIDEO] I posted about PCR: [LINK] This is a great video! They discussed and demonstrate Cedar's early text selection, copy and move commands, and compare them to Larry Tesler’s cut and paste (which didn't require any special keys or more than one mouse button). The Tioga text editor and other Cedar applications made common operations like repeatedly copying text into a document from different places very easy and streamlined (fewer actions than cut, copy and paste), by using the shift key while selecting text. Cedar took full advantage of the three button mouse as well as the control and shift keys (for 12 combinations of actions in any context, that worked the same everywhere). I think SunView and maybe even OpenWindows also supported a similar (but obscure) “quick paste” mode, where you hold down the special “Copy” function key, select some text without disturbing the current input focus, cursor position, or text selection, and then when you release the key, that text is pasted into the current input focus at the current position, moving the cursor forward. That way you didn’t have to lose your current selection or position, in order to just select some other text and copy it in. Here, I found the code to do it in an old version of NeWS -- it was the cut key to move, or the paste key to copy, and it's called the "Secondary" selection (rank=Secondary): [LINK] % Cut key: Either delete the primary selection (stashing it % on the

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pjmlp · 2021-01 · Strong recommendation

Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [VIDEO] "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" [LINK] "Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo" [LINK] "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" [LINK] "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" [LINK] "Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) [LINK] "The Interlisp programming environment" [LINK] And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage [LINK] [LINK]

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pjmlp · 2020-10 · Strong recommendation

Good that you mention Engelbart, because none of the mainstream desktop OSes are close to his ideas, or what the Xerox workstations allowed for, ironically Windows is probably the one most closest to it. While GNU/Linux have the necessary tooling for making it as well, but thanks to the fragmentation and some communities hatred against GNOME/KDE, it will never happen. This is what a modern desktop OS should look like, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [VIDEO] Including the part of being written on a memory safe systems programming language.

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