Submitted 15-Aug-00 by Gavin Clark:
> I'm not saying get rid of it at all, just make something else the default.
> it would be an easy thing to have vi come up as a choice for experts during
> the install.
Problem is newbies are the ones most likely to trash their installations
and need a rescue disk without a clearly defined plan of action. For
these individuals, vi is the only editor guaranteed to be running on the
system. the others are all in the /usr tree and/or linked to some
library in the /usr/lib heirarchy.
Also the file that has been suggested for making the modification is a
system-wide configuration file that would load even in the event of a
catastophic failure. So then $EDITOR points to an inaccessible binary
and we get 10,000 complaints on the list about "It crashed and now I
can't edit anything."
> everyone keeps saying how this has been around for 20 years, well that's
> plenty of time to add a line at the top with :
> 'type this for help', 'do this to save', 'do this to quit'
If you start it without a filename, it DOES tell you how to get help,
thankyouverymuch.
> currently vi is one of those 'you have to know the secret handshake'
> programs.
Vi is no more (and some say less) cryptic than emacs, and between the
two programs, you have more than 70% of the text editing market in *nix
operating systems. For ^%%*& sake, the way you edit command lines is
based specifically on either emacs or vi (one variable determines it).
Half of the text based interactive utilities are based in one way or
another on the same keybindings as one of those two.
>>> apparent help, no feedback, nothing. The first time I used vi I had to pull
>>> the plug on the computer because I couldn't figure out how to make it quit.
This still has me rolling on the floor. Turning off a multitasking
computer to kill a single app when it would have taken less than a
minute to look it up in *any* Unix/Linux book.
I do not understand how people can justify spending hundreds of dollars
on books to tell them that "this program works like half the other
windows programs you've used," and not purchase a single reference for
an operating system whose roots go back to long before Seattle Software
wrote DOS.
> Actually I'm coming at this from the Mac side, where if you have to read the
> manual the program sucks. ;-)
But this is *not* a point and click OS. The GUI (X) is an application that
sits on top of the OS. The Mac was designed from the ground up to be so
friendly that I actually know people who refused to buy them in the 80's
*because* of the same interface that you enjoy. What seems "intuitive" to
the point-and-click generation of computer users does not necessarily
make any sense to somebody who built his first computer from a $600 kit
that had a glorious 4K of RAM.
Comparing the Mac to a Linux machine is like comparing a sedan to a
lorry. They'll both get you there, but the sedan is a easier to operate.
>> And usability doesn't mean ridiculously easy - it means effective.
> It means both.
No, it doesn't. A jet fighter is terribly effective at what it does,
but it is not an easy thing to learn to use. And therein lies the basic
principle upon which subjective useability is built. I have the
Wordstar key sequences burned into the back of my brain from years of
using it. I can hit those two character control sequences in my sleep,
but somebody who didn't use a word processor until 1987 or so likely
never had to deal with such a bizaare system (unless they used Borland's
IDEs).
The bottom line is those keybindings make sense to me because I had to
learn them. To somebody who's idea of an early word processor is
WordPerfect 4.2 it would be gibberish and totally unuseable.
> For me it comes down to this, power tools are not for children.
And some of those tools include the one that sparked this whole thread.
If you do enough of your homework to understand cron, then you bleeding
well ought to have brains enough to read the frigging docs.
<RANT> (Well, as if I wasn't already, but. . .) This thread seems to me
to have started because somebody wanted to switch to linux for all the
wrong reasons. The most popular of these wrong reasons is that it isn't
a Microsoft product. In the past two years, Linux has grown
tremendously as various projects outside the central Linux effort
matured. Anyone who has ever run X11R3 knows that it wasn't exactly
what you would call more than "functional".
Before the development of Win95, DOS did have some minor competition
from extremely overpriced unices (System V and SCO come to mind), and a
product called DR-DOS, originally developed by Digital Research (the
people who brought you GEM).
Alternative OSes are not something new, and they aren't going away.
(Despite what some people seem to think.) Other than the complaints
(like this one) that certain commands/apps are to cryptically oriented,
the biggest complaint we hear as Linux users is the lack of game
support.
Most of these complaints come from people who did not own a computer in
96 and earlier. When Windows 95 debuted one of the big complaingts from
the gaming community was the fact that all the good games were written
for DOS. This continued to be the case until the development of the
DirectX API, because with DOS you just wrote to the lowest common
denominator: VGA graphics, SB or AdLib compatible sound.
Given that the Linux operating system has only been getting significant commercial
attention for about two or three years while Windows was built on the
DOS user base, we're actually doing quite well. The number of
(commercial) games available aproximates the number of Win 95 games
available in 97 (How many of you remember having to reboot before and
after playing certain DOS games because of how Windows memory management
works?)
I don't have a Windows partition on my hard drive because the only
Windows games I really liked have been ported, and the other games I
play are DOS based. That means that I have less than 5 megabytes of OS
on my DOS partition compared to 210 for a minimum install of Win98.
I freely admit that Tombraider, DUNE, Civilization, and Mech Warrior
aren't up to today's graphics standards, but it doesn't change the fact
that I like them. (And no, I don't like freeciv).
</RANT>
--
Anton Graham GPG ID: 0x18F78541
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> RSA key available upon request
There is nothing wrong with writing ... as long as it is done in private and
you wash your hands afterward.
