[Gllug] On Linux desktops...

[Alex Hudson]

On Wednesday 17 October 2001 4:45 pm, you wrote:
> >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?

See that power button on the front of your compter? That's a user interface. 
The knobs on your cooker are the user interface. 'Graphical' denotes the use 
of graphs to represent the interface. Ergo....

Would you call XEmacs a command line tool? I wouldn't. I wouldn't call pico 
one either. I would, however, call grep a command line tool. This is the 
difference I'm trying to get across. The fact that KDE tools have a 
specialised non-text GUI doesn't make them 'more' GUI than pico, it just 
makes them more specialist.

> >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.

I was comparing the GUI of pico and vi, listing some features which make the 
pico UI better. The fact that a feature is useless for an experienced user 
doesn't mean that's not a valid differentiator.

> >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.

So what? jpico allows you to hide it with Ctrl-G. So, jpico has a better 
interface than pico. That still doesn't invalidate my comparison.

> 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.

consistency != orthogonality.

> >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.

Well, there's a water-tight argument if ever I saw one.... I didn't say that 
all X-type widgets were better than all text-type ones. My central point - 
that an X-type display is capable of holding vastly more information than a 
text one - remains.

Cheers,
					Alex.

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