Re: Great SWT Program

In article <c68bdcae-1ea7-4d7f-afc8-6eea1e346cde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<bbound@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 14, 9:44 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hmm .... I started to write "yes indeed", because it's certainly
the case that I'm more apt to be annoyed when a GUI application
behaves in a way I find limiting, while I'm more forgiving
about the shortcomings of my old-friend text-mode applications.

Aha! Bias!

Yes. I try to notice it as much in myself as I do in others. I'd
recommend the same approach to you, but I doubt it would have any
effect.

Also, sometimes when you find a GUI limiting it's because you're
trying to do X by doing Y, where Y is the crufty and inefficient only
way to do X in the text-mode apps but the GUI lets you do X much more
smoothly and efficiently by doing Z, which isn't even possible in text-
mode (or would be even nastier than Y if you managed to implement it
in text mode, whereas Y is nastier in a proper UI). So you try to do Y
in the GUI and it's either even clunkier and more awkward than you're
used to or it simply isn't possible, while overlooking Z.

s/crufty and inefficient/unobvious to newbies/ and I might agree
with you here.

It does seem to me that if GUIs were as intuitive and easy
to use as you've been saying, Z would be obvious and I'd have
discovered it. I guess you could claim that it *would* be obvious
to someone not blinkered by previous experience with CLIs. My
observation is that sometimes Z doesn't seem to have occurred
to people without that experience/bias either, but -- I think
that's being discussed in another branch of this thread.

people don't go looking for features they don't know about or
imagine existing.

Indeed; see above. At least with GUIs when they *do* go looking they
can actually *find* it in a nice way.

[ snip ]

BOTH sides could use docs with more "how to get started" and "how to
do X" oriented sections in addition to the usual reference-style
material.

Yup -- of course, there's a wealth of such information out there,
some of it online and some in books. Separating the good stuff
from the not-so-good can be a problem, though.

[ snip ]

I don't think it's so much a matter of having lots of features,
but of having features that are, well, expert-friendly.

Sorry, circular definition error.

Yes, sort of; that's why I put in that ", well, ".

(what I remember is difficulties in figuring out how to have a
library of macros to be shared among documents, though that may
be a problem that's easy to solve if you know how), and there are,
as I understand it, some security-risk implications.

You put them in normal.dot, or use your own .dot when creating the
documents you want to use the libary in, and have the macros in that
dot.

Yeah. The way I remember it, putting everything in normal.dot
seemed wrong for macros that were specific to a collection
of documents, and setting up a separate .dot file for the
collection -- I can't remember details, only that there were
various awkwardnesses. Part of the problem may have been that I'm
apt to like to rearrange my files a lot (moving things from one
folder to another, subdividing a folder into subfolders, that kind
of thing), and a lot of "modern" tools seem not to cope very well
with that. Apparently it's not something most people do. <shrug>

The security risk implications are going to arise wherever there's a
highly programmable macro facility. The main problem is that they
architected Word to store macros into documents, instead of load them
from the dot template but put only a reference to this in the document
(and the macros become unavailable if the document is used on an
install that lacks the template in question, or where it exists but
lacks the macros). This allows documents to carry macros from machine
to machine, enabling viral behavior. The sole reason the security risk
is less with say elisp is that emacs-created .txt files don't contain
elisp macros.

I wonder if Microsoft has already redesigned Word to not transport
macros in documents, but instead reference files containing them from
documents and degrade gracefully when the macros are missing as
described above.

Security-conscious and expert-friendly behavior in a Microsoft
product? Well, I suppose it's not impossible, and my thinking
it's unlikely is probably more bias. Sort of a :-).

* Support for external automation. AFAICT, both vi and emacs lack
this; scripting text manipulation tends to be done with sed instead.

I can't speak for real vi or emacs, but vim can be run in a sort
of batch mode in which it's controlled by an external script.

How wacky. Screen-oriented interactive programs will however make poor
automation fodder. For starters they'll clobber any previous output
from a running script when they start up and overwrite the whole
display.

Ah yes -- I seem to remember that this is how MS Word behaves.
vim, fortunately, behaves more sensibly; run in batch mode, it
quietly makes the changes you asked for.

Second, they are heavyweight compared to things like sed,
which I'm given to understand was specificlaly made to do text
manipulation from inside scripts. Right tool for the job and all that.

Quite. Which is why when I have something simple to do, I
probably will use sed rather than reading up on how to run vim
in batch mode -- as I said in my previous post. What's your
point here? I *thought* you were indicating that it would be
more expert-friendly if vim and emacs were scriptable; now you
seem to be saying that an expert wouldn't make use of that feature
even though it's available.

For one-off jobs it usually seems easier to use vim's
macro-recording-and-replay features. (emacs also has macro
recording and replay.)

That's internal scriptability, rather than external, though.

Yes. What's your point here?

[ snip ]

(Have you looked up the origins or meaning of "home row" yet?)

Aren't you the vi partisan? Bent and the others are the emacs
partisans.

In other words -- you haven't looked it up.

I just did a Google search on the phrase "home row". The first
hit is for a Wikipedia article that makes no mention of emacs.

[ snip ]

There's a certain snob appeal to being able to use something
not everyone apparently can manage, sure

Frank admission of guilt noted for the record.

s/guilt/behavior not up to the highest standard in every respect/

I don't consider this a major flaw, but a human imperfection of
the kind most people have, akin to liking to show off -- not
perhaps the best possible behavior, but not something to feel
too bad about, as long as one isn't obnoxious about it.

I know, I know -- you don't have any human imperfections. Do
try to bear with us lesser beings.

But I'd say I'm not so much actively opposed to tools' being
beginner-friendly as simply indifferent.

Yet, making it novice-friendly seems to suffice to make you no longer
consider it expert-friendly. Interesting, that.

I'm not sure how you draw that conclusion from anything I've said.
(Well, I have some speculations, but I'll keep them to myself.)

An example that comes to mind of an expert-friendly tool being
made more novice-friendly is emacs, which, in its current form,
started from a graphical environment, comes up in a separate
window with a toolbar, presumably partly in an effort to be more
accessible to novices. If I were an emacs user, I might find
that somewhat annoying, but there's a command-line switch that
makes it come up in text mode, so it's not as if the change
makes the tool less expert-friendly.

[ snip ]

--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
.

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