[Gllug] On Linux desktops...

[Richard Cohen]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, David Damerell wrote:

> 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.

Indeed.

> >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?

Bash has a UI.  In my opinion, it has quite a nice UI, with things like
(programmable in newer releases) tab-completion, variable substitution and
so on.  I doubt anybody would attempt to argue that bash has a GUI.

> >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.

Everyone uses everything for the first time once.  If that can be made
easier without making it harder for more experienced users, why not?

> >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.

Without wanting to get back into the Pine v. the rest argument, you can get
rid of the menus in Pine, so you don't lose the real estate.

> >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.

Indeed.

> >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.

And indeed.

Cheers
Richard


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