Re: Great SWT Program

In article <bf63ef4c-54e1-4120-8b83-e043aa3b2643@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<nebulous99@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 6, 10:08 am, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
What happened last was:

You: Twisted said foobar.
Me: You're a liar and putting words in my mouth.

Implication: Twisted did not say foobar and you're a liar.

Nowhere did I concede to having said foobar, even by omission.

With the revised rules that say it's ok to call you a liar, I suppose
the hypothetical example above would hold.

No. There are no command line switches involved in a straight-forward
conversion.

So it just guesses what to convert to?

No.

It can read the source file to
detect its type with a fair amount of certainty

Yes.

, but the only
information it may have about the destination type is the file name
extension you want to give the destination file.

Yes.

Certainly, if you
specified only the source file and wanted a destination file with the
same name except for the appropriately-changed extension you'd have to
specify the destination type somehow. Guessing types based solely on
file extension is unsafe anyway.

It seems not.

They a) display the functionality clearly and cleanly

And how, pray tell, would an icon "clearly and cleanly" symbolize a
conversion from GIF to PDF as opposed to a conversion from TIFF to
JPG?

Who said anything about the icon doing this? The text caption below or
to the right of the icon (depending on view settings) is what would
communicate this information.

Exactly, it's the text that carries the relevant information. Thank
you.

man pages aren't used to access Unix utilities in the first place.

Exactly. You have to go to one place and use one crufty and primitive
"browser" to discover functionality and how to invoke it, and memorize
some stuff, then go someplace else and type what you memorized to
actually invoke that functionality, instead of being able to discover
functionality and immediately invoke it right then and there in the
same place.

If you're a beginner and so need to refer to man pages constantly,
you'll generally have a separate window for that so there no need for
that going back and forth process that you propose.

It's missing, which means it will do who knows what default
conversion. Unless the default destination type happens to be pdf,
you'll likely end up with a file named "blah.pdf" but actually in jpeg
format or something like that. Unless, of course, you just get an
error message.

[implied insult deleted; mental health again? Not very creative, are
you?]

I didn't mention mental health at all - that is your own creation.

[rude and condescending BS snipped] Nevertheless, the number of key
presses in the above command could be as little as 10-14

as compared to two clicks or thereabouts and zero keyboard typing.

There is no interface that would let you do the same with two clicks
except by first expending considerably more clicks to put you into a
position to set up the relevant command.

By your own admission, you would even have to download and install new
software to do it and with your explanation that you have no idea
where to even begin looking, we're talking an afternoon's work at the
very least here.

It's amazing. Especially if you're using a laptop (or worse, a PDA) in
seat 37B with other passengers hogging both of the armrests beside you
and the one in front of you reclining an impolitely large amount, kind
of limiting your elbow room. During turbulence. Seatbelt-sign-keeps-
going-on-and-off-again level turbulence. Truly amazing.

Air travel "analogies" now?

depending on your system. One
typical example would be
conv<tab><tab><tab><backspace><backspace><backspace>pdf<enter>

Baloney. First, there's no filename fragments in here at all.

No, there's this tricky auto completion issue again. You really /do/
need to look it up.

Second, that minimalist, random-file-converting example is already 14
characters, so forget any of the lower numbers in the range "10-14".

There are more minimalist examples, but I figured I wouldn't make it
too complicated for you seeing how much you struggle with this whole
auto completion concept.

Then there's the elbow-room factor, the PDA-with-only-a-pointing-
device factor,

I can only assume that these are more make-believe limitations of your
own devising.

and the latency factor; you don't dare go on blindly
after hitting tab to autocomplete since you need to be sure it picked
what you expected before going on,

You certainly can, but you will probably want to inspect the result
before hitting enter.

so on a low-latency connection it's
wait or risk having actually invoked a command named "conv-format-all-
fixed-disks".

Seeing that this command doesn't actually exist, the problem also
doesn't. Moreover, there is a tendency not to run image conversion
commands as super user so there is a strict limit to how much damage
you can do.

:) Oh, and did I mention the ease of fucking this up?
For a short time the input line is very dangerous because it is a
command that will overwrite one of your preexisting files. If enter
manages to get pressed while it's in this state, either accidentally
or because you forget to edit the second parameter ... boom!

My enter key rarely manages to get pressed on its own initiative.

To a touch typist, this is hardly noticable.

But twice that number (a far more realistic number of keystrokes) is
certainly noticeable.

Not really, no.

(irrelevance snipped)

Not can the
shell, because it has insufficient information to know what sort of
input the binary is expecting.

It will auto-complete file and path names.

But it doesn't even know what tokens ARE file or path names, aside
from that the first token on the line necessarily is one.

It doesn't need to - it auto completes path/file names all the same.

(And the first token isn't necessarily one either.)

It remains a problem when you keep using the mouse and therefore
repeatedly need to find your way back to the keyboard.

Not when each use of the mouse saves you 25+ keystrokes it doesn't.

Even if 25 keystrokes were necessary, a touch typist takes a
negligible amount of time to type them.

And a proficient mouse user takes an even smaller amount of time to
clickety-click.

Hardly. He has to navigate directory trees, pick out files, pick an
application, click around within it to get it to do what he wants it
to and so forth.

Cheers,
Bent D
--
Bent Dalager - bcd@xxxxxxx - http://www.pvv.org/~bcd
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