John Andersen wrote:
On 11/30/2009 4:01 AM, Anton Aylward wrote:
... But of course, as the modern Linux GUIs show, as OpenOffice shows as MONO shows, there are many people who are convinced that Linux is only going to succeed by aping Windows as closely as possible.
For pete sake Anton, are you totally incapable or recognizing humor even in the presence of smilies?
Well, even recognizing the danger of getting into yet another pointless religious argument between the Hardheaded Old Farts who have to cling to the command line no matter what, and the Empty-Headed Young Twits who can't see beyond the eye candy in their Latest Hot Bling-filled desktop, I think it's worthwhile to have a discussion regarding where computing in general, and linux in particular, are going. Being a fairly HOF myself, but not tied too tightly to the Ancient Computing World, I see the development of GUI's as a brilliantly positive step forward that can make the full power of computing available to anyone who has the moxie to work with it at all, and I refuse to accept the declaration that only the command line can give you real power. Take, for example, the Firefox configuration that is now under discussion. I agree it's silly to have just a single system-wide configuration file like the Windows Registry, even on an application basis. On the other hand, we HOF's should recall that the unix profile is multilevel in all the shells I've used (Bourne, ksh, csh, bash). Each of the shells has both a system-wide and a user-specific configuration file -- indeed, there are a couple of them at both levels. The Firefox arrangement is most of a perfect setup, lacking only easy access to configuration and good commenting, or, better, a help section, telling us how to use it. Ever since I found out about about:config and about:plugins one of the first things I've done upon installation has been to type them into the address bar and bookmark them. Mozilla ought to do that along with the marketing crap they put into the mozilla folder in the last few releases. I have no use for the text-based web browsers and little for such antique editors as vi and emacs (and yes, I do know and use vi when I have to). kate, jedit, etc. do just as much in practice as any of them, and are much easier to use. The little scripting I need is quite well taken care of with selection and filtering. I've never had a need for complex regular expressions, but I recognize the extra power they can give, and have experimented with them on occasion. I see no reason their power cannot be duplicated in a GUI-based editor, but I've never seen it, it's true. I suspect that those who really need it are already adept, and the GUI programmers don't see the need. There's no reason at all to limit the multilevel configuration paradigm to the command line, but I'm not aware of any GUI applications that use them; and what configuration files are there are either very limited or hard to get to -- or both. When I was limited to the command line, I couldn't script much of what I wanted to do because I had to decide whether to learn ed or awk or sed or bison or bash scripting or whatever, and had neither the time nor the will to bother with them, so I frequently did what I needed to do manually. Since I've never been a systems administrator or systems programmer, the closest thing I've ever had to a common single task has been handled quite well with make -- I haven't even had to learn link scripting! So I never had a strong incentive to take up the antique editing scripts. To summarize (which halfway convinces me that most of what I just said was pointless :-), pursuing an accelerating path toward GUI support for more and more of computing's power, and melding the fundamental power of the old command line with the intuitive power of the GUI, can give us the best of both worlds; and I'd like to see just that -- a true melding of the two kinds of power. I don't see them as incompatible, and I think the idea that GUI is bad just because Microsoft stole it from Apple, who stole it from Xerox, is just plain silly. Just as i think the idea that CLI is bad just because it's old, is just plain silly. Just as I think the idea that either is fundamentally superior to the other is silly. How many of you HOF's really don't use a GUI desktop, and how many of you EYT's really don't use selection and filtering? Thank you, kde, gnome, enlightenment, twm, fvwm, etc. Thank you, even Microsoft and Apple, for popularizing Xerox's brilliant new user interface paradigm that has opened computer use to millions who couldn't have used the old stuff we loved in the '70's, and made life easier for us professionals who have always had other things to think about than the details of an obscure, counterintuitive script interpreter when we had a job to do. John Perry -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org