![]() Dissertation, Project MAC MAC-TR-32, September 1966. ^ Warren Teitelman, "PILOT: A Step towards Man-Computer Symbiosis", M.I.T.The Magit User Manual describes the behaviour of magit-diff-dwim simply: " Show changes for the thing at point". Among its numerous diff commands, there is a magit-diff-dwim command, which requires no further input from the user but simply guesses what the user wants to analyse based on the location of the cursor. For example, the Emacs Magit package evinces this design philosophy pervasively. This kind of DWIM is often not directly concerned with correcting user error but rather guessing user intent from available context. GNU Emacs has a comment-dwim function that comments out a selected region if uncommented, or uncomments it when already commented out, while using comment characters and indentation appropriate for the programming language environment and current context. The Emacs wiki gives the example of a file copy command that is able to deduce the destination path from a split window configuration that contains two dired buffers, one of which displays the source path this behaviour also generalises to many applicable dired actions that take two directory paths for arguments.ĭWIM behaviour, when available, is often mentioned in a command's name e.g. The concept of DWIM has been adopted in augmented form within the context of the GNU Emacs text editor to describe the design philosophy of Emacs Lisp functions or commands that attempt to intelligently " do the right thing" depending on context. Ĭritics of DWIM claimed that it was "tuned to the particular typing mistakes to which Teitelman was prone, and no others" and called it "Do What Teitelman Means" or "Do What Interlisp Means", or even claimed DWIM stood for "Damn Warren's Infernal Machine." Emacs He should not be stopped and forced to correct himself or give additional information in situations where the correction or information is obvious. Since we want the user to feel that he is conversing with the system, User's request from contextual information. Given unrecognized input.the style of interface used throughout Interlisp allows the user to omit various parameters and have these default to reasonable values.ĭWIM is an embodiment of the idea that the user is interacting with an agent who attempts to interpret the Teitelman and his Xerox PARC colleague Larry Masinter later described the philosophy of DWIM in the Interlisp programming environment (the successor of BBN Lisp):Īlthough most users think of DWIM as a single identifiable package, it embodies a pervasive philosophy of user interface design: at the user interface level, system facilities should make reasonable interpretations when ![]() Teitelman's DWIM package "correct errors automatically or with minor user intervention", similarly to autocorrection for natural language. ![]() The term was coined by Warren Teitelman in his DWIM package for BBN Lisp, part of his PILOT system, sometime before 1966. DWIM ( do what I mean) computer systems attempt to anticipate what users intend to do, correcting trivial errors automatically rather than blindly executing users' explicit but potentially incorrect input. ![]()
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