For review: Term display helper

[Tyson Dowd]

On 02-Mar-1998, Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> 
> On the topic of consistent user-interface design, why is it that
> in vi, "q" means "quit without saving" and "x" means "quit and save",
> whereas in mail, elm and mutt, "q" means "quit and save" and "x"
> means "quit without saving"?

This is the result of a long standing user interface problem with
word-processors or editors of any sort.  The default action in a
word processor is to work on a copy of your file in volatile memory,
and not save this to non-volatile memory unless you explicitly ask.
It would probably be better if it were automatically saved, and you
could ask to make backups of older versions and the like if you needed
them, but everyone has become used to the idiom as it is given.
So in editors, "quit" means quit without save by default.

Mailers have the correct setup - quit means quit and save, of course,
because why would you want to have done all that work and not save the
results.  But of course, quit without save is now familiar to so many
users (and they "abuse" it to do some useful things), that is it given
another prime position on the keyboard.