[Gllug] On Linux desktops...

[David Damerell]

On Wednesday, 17 Oct 2001, Alex Hudson wrote:
>GUIs are tools for power users - they enable people to do work more quickly. 

Let's remember this statement.

>People do, though, often misunderstand what it means to be command-line. Just 
>because a display is made of text, on a console, doesn't mean it's
>not a GUI. 

Out of interest, what do you imagine the 'G' in GUI - that
distinguishes it from just a 'UI' - stands for?

>looks like. So, Pine has a better GUI than vi, for example, because it's a 
>lot easier to get into initially,

Which is meaningless to the experienced user.

>the shortcuts are easily available,

Which, if it can't be suppressed, is actively harmful to the
experienced user, who loses 2 lines of screen real estate to stuff
they already know.

>and it edits more consistently.

If this means anything at all, it's completely wrong. Pico, Pine's
inbuilt editor, is about as useful as a rubber crutch; if we were to
say that an editor is 'consistent', we would have to pick the one
where all kinds of commands can take an arbitrary motion command as an
argument and acts on the text covered by the motion command - that's
consistency.

>example), because a text-based interface is incredibly limited in terms of 
>interaction - how do you design a drop-down menu in text?

Well, perhaps someone can do a better job than Netscape, but both lynx
and w3m handle drop-down lists in Web forms with large numbers of
entries much more gracefully than Netscape does.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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