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Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.plus.com wrote:
On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 13:11 +0000, Chris Green wrote:
Desktops as such don't hide complexity, they just mask it with a different complexity. A simple desktop may hide complexity but then so may a simple window manager with a different paradigm, how about TWM with a single xterm window on it?
So are you against a GUI interface in general and the Desktop concept is just part of that paradigm ?
I like my GUI without an evil desktop - lots of frames, lots of terminals, lots of tabs. Hmmm. tasty.
http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/
That's what I use day to day, it gets out of my way, lets me use the keyboard for everything, makes it easy to add keybindings through it's config files (none of that awful pointy clicky configuration rubbish), and, best of all, it works. There are a few things that I want to change that I haven't quite worked out yet, but I'm working on those - and hopefully I'll have an environment that really does stay the hell out of my way RSN :)
I never understand this way of thinking, you must agree that the WIMP interface opened computing up to people who would have never touched it otherwise. Humans generally relate to something which in itself relates to a physical environment. Although limiting once you venture outside tasks the designers didn't envisage, it gives ordinary people a chance of finding out how to do something without continuously referring to documentation.
Yes - and if you've ever worked in Tech Support, you tend to wish it had never bloody happened!
I am not saying there isn't a place for terminal windows and text mode only software...there is and it can be (with the help of a decent shell) very very powerful, more so that even the best designed GUI's. But for some tasks it is easier...it is more intuitive and frankly it just makes sense.
Yes, there are a few uses for GUIs, for one, it means that you can run a graphical web browser, which given that it's now all about the aesthetics rather than the damned content is a neccessity. As for word processing - just don't get me started - when people learn to use styles rather than fonts, and when all word processors don't suck, then maybe it'll be a better world, until then I'll stick with plain text or LaTeX for things that I need to be able to read. Possibly XML, or even XHTML for somethings, especially if other people are going to want to read them. I use rather a lot of wiki style markup - including for my blog posts, but given that you can read that in any old text editor, I don't see that as a problem either, and the content is not reliant on the layout.
Cheers, - -- Brett Parker web: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ email: iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk