From: "Carlos E. R." <robin.listas@telefonica.net> Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2023 21:16:22 +0100 On 2023-03-09 21:05, Bob Rogers wrote:
Not true; the Wikipedia article cites DIRED from SAIL in 1974 and Neptune on the Xerox Alto from 1973-74 as predecessors [1]. I have used Emacs dired for ages myself; the point of all these TUI interfaces (which I don't think has been made in this thread) is that it makes interaction much faster than in point-and-click interfaces, once you learn the keystrokes.
That's true, but it is not the only thing. File copy operation, or file delete operations, for instance, are faster because updating a text display is usually faster than updating a GUI display, as the program does its job behind the display. True.
And the point of integration with Emacs, my primary computer interface, should be self-explanatory. ;-}
I have never been happy with the emacs interface, nor vi's. I learned vi before emacs, then learned emacs as I was learning Lisp, and found that they both have their quirks. But the fact that emacs can be customized on many levels, including via Lisp coding, made it quickly become far more comfortable for me than vi.
-- Bob Rogers http://www.rgrjr.com/
[1] So giving DOS credit here is in the same league as saying that Bill Gates invented the computer mouse. :-/
Well, I never heard of those ancient predecessors. My first computer I owned was a MsDOS / DR DOS PC. Or maybe a TI-57. I go back as far as PDP-8's in the mid-70's, when operating systems were legion. Let's see now, at one time in 1975 or 1976 I was using RT-11 DOS, RSTS V4-12a BASIC timesharing, and BASIC Timesharing Incorporated systems on PDP-11 hardware, timeshared Edusystem-something BASIC on PDP-8 hardware, and something else I don't recall (a minicomputer spinoff from DEC that went out of business relatively quickly in the PC era). All of this was pre-GUI, and it was easier to learn different operating systems at the time, because they were all much simpler (and stupider). That's not counting the other systems I got to see in operation -- I got demos of Arpanet, and tours of SAIL and Xerox Parc, my first glimpse of GUIs and mice a full decade before Windows, thanks to growing up in Silcon Valley. Pity I picked the wrong startups to work for. However, I'm not sure those predecessors were OFMs, whereas the MsDOS tools were. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.4 x86_64 at Telcontar) I'm not completely sure where the dividing lines are between a "directory editor," a "file-list manager, and an "OFM" according to the Wikipedia page. I believe dired is single-pane and the others are multipane, but the other distinction escapes me. -- Bob