From: Mark Roberts (mu@manumark.de)
Date: Tue Jul 11 2000 - 13:08:01 CEST
On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Alfred Breull wrote:
> (Further and because I'm too unexperienced, I see no
> advantage in using x-windows over mc and command lines.)
Absolutely right. Long live the command line. On most monitors, the
console doesn't affect my vision as much as an xterm.
The world of user-machine-interfaces is a varied one. The two extremes
are:
(1) The command line. You can do anything if you know where to start.
(2) The OK-button. You can do one thing, which is fine if that was the
one thing you wanted done.
I prefer the former. But I still believe in interfaces between the two
extremes that might let you keep some of the freedom of the command line,
while giving you more hints as to what the possibilities are right now.
The checkbox
[x] allow more than one file per sheet
versus the command line options
-c and -nc
might be an example of the flaws of command line syntax that can easily
be triumphed over by GUIs. I had this idea that GUIs for such simple cases
could almost be created automatically from man-pages. Or, to be more
realistic, let's create a language that describes such options in a
machine readable form, so that you can choose to type 'a2ps -nc foo.[hc]'
or you can choose to type 'markgui a2ps' and click the boxesand fill in
the text fields.
Anyway, how would we preview TeX-documents without X? On paper?
Happy typing, everybody!
Mark Roberts
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