[Pmwiki-users] Acrobatics while typing [:...:] and math markup

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 11:46:04AM +0200, chr at home.se wrote:
> >     [:spacewikiwords:] [:joinwikiwords:] [:ignorewikiwords:]
> 
> This discussion was a while back, but it takes a bit of hand acrobatics
> for me to type '[:' using a Swedish keyboard. I think Knut also mentioned
> this. Although I suspect it's to late to change '[:' into something else,
> I wondered if the following had been suggested:
> 	(:spacewikiwords:) (:joinwikiwords:) (:ignorewikiwords:)
> It probably was, and if so, does anyone remember what the drawbacks were?

I think it had been suggested and someone (me?) remarked that it looked
like a bunch of smileys around the directives.

> If there are no major drawbacks, and '[:...:]' is going to be kept as the
> standard, I would probably still configure my sites to allow the use of
> both notations. That's not so good from another point of view of course,
> since searching for [:spacewikiwords:] will fail if you entered it as 
> (:spacewikiwords:).

That's probably why doing a replace-on-save substitution--i.e., changing
(:...:) to [:...:] when the page is saved--is probably a better approach.
Of course this means that people have to know the (:...:) markup is 
available.

I know that [:directive:] is difficult for many keyboards to type, so a
strong chorus of support for (:directive:) (or any other single alternative,
with few negative votes) would convince me to switch even at this late date.  
Otherwise I'm pretty sure that [:directive:] is going to be the syntax.

Pm