On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 05:55:14PM +0000, Ian bell wrote:
Brett Parker wrote:
*SIGH* - personally, I have no desktop, but then I run ion3, I don't have floating windows (except gimp, and that lives on a floating workspace, which is only created when I need it). I don't follow why people have become pointy clicky beasts, it's giving less control, and more frustration if anything goes wrong (had to deal with openoffice the other day, that frustrated the hell out of me, gimme LaTeX any day).
Personally I cannot undestand why people cling to keyboard only interfaces. I tried Emacs sveral times but having to remember weird key sequences to do even the simplest of things frustrated the hell out of me. Give me pointy clicky any day.
Hmm... if you run emacs (or xemacs) under X, you get a hell of a lot of stuff for pointing & clicking...
The objective reason behind preferring "keyboard" over "point & click" is that symbolic communication (with the computer) is more powerful than icon- or index-oriented communication -- see
http://gwa.municipia.at/files/semiotics.html
for an interesting discussion of this. More specifically, while the advantage of not having to move a hand away from the keyboard may be a relatively insignificant one (to some people, at least), the advantage of being able to properly program your system (such as e.g. provided by emacs and LaTeX, but not by OpenOffice) is so large that I haven't ever seen anyone revert back to point & click after starting to use scripting and programming features -- and for obvious reasons, programmable systems tend to be keyboard-driven.
Best regards, Jan