Re: Great SWT Program

In article <edde7cd1-edc9-434a-ae80-d58284cee24d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<nebulous99@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 10, 12:32 pm, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
So it just guesses what to convert to?

No.

Well if it isn't told explicitly, it has to try to guess somehow.

Not at all.

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

Yes.

In other words, it guesses. :P

Of course not. The format is explicitly given by the file name.

Guessing types based solely on
file extension is unsafe anyway.

It seems not.

Sure it is. That's why there's MIME, magic numbers in file formats,
and other systems for file type determination and communication.

No. They exist in part because they can work in the absence of file
names, in part because they make the task somewhat easier and in part
because they also cover all sorts of formats beyond graphics formats.

Gee,
you're not very knowledgeable about some areas of computer technology,
are you?

Of course not, but this is not one of them.

So much, by the way, for conveniently converting foo.gif to foo.png;
you can't just specify the source file, the destination type, and get
output with just the extension changed. Instead you have to wastefully
type the whole damn name over again. Which may be a lot longer than
"foo".

This /would/ be considered difficult, I suppose, by someone who
doesn't understand the auto completion concept.

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

OK, so now you're no longer claiming that the Windows version of such
a conversion tool is crufty?

It probably is - I did not touch upon this aspect above.

[snip some irrelevancies about windows -- we're talking text-mode unix
remember? -- and beginners]

You previously stated that you didn't talk about beginners, but about
trained users. Please make up your mind.

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.

Except that you can do that just once, and then invoke the same
command numerous times.

Ah, two clicks /per file/ then? How crufty.

By your own admission, you would even have to download and install new
software to do it

Yes. You do need to have a given piece of software installed before
you can use it, as a general rule, unless it's used remotely.

[snip speculation about how long it would take me to find]

Five minutes.

Heh. Keep dreaming :-)

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

No, there's this tricky auto completion issue again. [implied insult deleted]

I know, but with no filename fragment, it either won't complete
anything or it will pick the first file in the directory or something.

What do you know, hole in one.

To control it into picking a SPECIFIC file requires typing enough of
the filename to disambiguate. You never did this in your broken
example.

Ah, but I did. I will leave it as an exercise for to the Twisted to
figure out how this can be the case.

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 [implied insult deleted]

Baloney. The example you gave is as minimal as it can be, with the
arguments entirely generated by tab completion and as little of the
command name typed as possible before also tab completing it.

Not at all - this depends entirely upon what other commands you have
on your path. As an example, if all you had on your path was "convert"
and nothing else you might get away with e.g. "co<tab>". Or, of
course, if you use convert a lot you may have aliased it as "c", etc.

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

I can only assume that these are [implied insult deleted]

You forgot my earlier example of trying to use your cruft while in a
crowded environment? Airplane, subway, bus ... any of those would be
nasty.

You are trying to say that waving a mouse about is /convenient/ in
such situations? Have you been getting enough sleep lately?

And then you have to wait for it to catch up. No more cutting corners
and setting speed records riskily by typing blind then. :P

I have a modern computer, which generally doesn't have any trouble
"keeping up" with text input.

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

How do YOU know? There may not be such a thing on your computer, but
it isn't an illegal filename, so if someone put a file named /bin/conv-
format-all-fixed-disks file on a system ... and it did as the name
implied ... well, you get the picture.

In that case, they are setting themselves up for a disaster. This same
person could, of course, also replace his "Word" shortcut with a batch
file that does "format /y c:" - there are many good ways to cause a
local catastrophe.

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.

In practise, the superuser runs all kinds of stuff as superuser just
because logging out and back in and losing all session state every
five minutes is hugely inconvenient.

Perhaps you do this. Perhaps your crufty systems make it inconvenient
to do otherwise. It happening on a Unix system is an extremely rare
occurrence.

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

Of course not, but slips of the fingers and accidents and such happen.

Rarely enough not to bother about.

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

Not really, no.

Uh-oh. Bent's in denial again...

For someone who claims to be typing as fast as a trained touch typist,
you sure seem to attach excessive cost to your characters typed.

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

But how does it even know whether that's what the user intends?

When the user hits <tab>, then file name completion is what he wants
because that is what he will get.

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

Sure it is, unless it's an alias or a shell builtin, which are
occasional special cases.

Wow, hole in one again. You are getting better and better at spotting
your own mistakes - I am full of hope once more!

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.

Unless windows are already open and parked in the appropriate places.

Which also took effort that needs to be part of the calculation, of
course.

The setup work only has to be done once per session, so the time and
effort involved in doing so can be safely ignored.

Ah. Doing the actual /command/ is only done once per session in my
case, so I can happily ignore the effort then. Good to know :-)

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

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