[Gllug] On Linux desktops...

[David Damerell]

On Wednesday, 17 Oct 2001, Alex Hudson wrote:
>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
>>>to 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....

You mean 'graphics'.

>Would you call XEmacs a command line tool? I wouldn't. I wouldn't call pico 
>one either.

No. I would call pico a screen-mode text-based tool. Xemacs, well, it
depends if you're running under X.

>I would, however, call grep a command line tool. This is the 
>difference I'm trying to get across.

Unfortunately, the difference you're expressing - that between a
line-mode and a screen-mode tool - isn't the difference between a GUI
and a non-GUI.

>>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.

So what _do_ you mean when you say an editor is consistent? Because I
don't think you are saying anything meaningful at all.

>>>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.

Of course, but it is curious that your example was something that's
handled very badly by a popular GUI tool and much better by the
equivalent text tools. It might even suggest that your dismissal of
text interfaces has not been carefully considered.

>My central point - 
>that an X-type display is capable of holding vastly more information than a 
>text one - remains.

That depends on the information, really. Text is pretty dense; which
is why so many X displays are just tools for accessing big windows
full of text.

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

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