John Sturdy's presentation about User Interfaces for Programming

Approaches to editing programs span the range from pure text editors to pure structure editors. Emacs's major modes are nearer to the text editing approach, but the underlying system is sufficiently programmable to extend this to take advantage of the program text structure without having to impose the inflexibility of a pure structure editor.

As I started to extend emacs to reduce its keyboard use, I started to explore a range of non-exclusive options both for the form of the input from the programmer and for its semantics.


  1. Rethinking the user interface
  2. User Interface Constraints
  3. Present approaches to editing programs
  4. Changes we need to make
  5. VR limitations
  6. Classifying input methods
  7. Making a new system
  8. A suitable base system
  9. Stages of work
    1. A flexible navigation system
    2. Command space
    3. Embedded commands in voice input
    4. Program-editing command-set
    5. Easy command access
  10. The future
  11. The dangers
  12. Summary

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Last modified: Wed Jun 18 15:41:25 GMT Standard Time 2003