Re: Bugs should be reported to mc-devel@gnome.org
On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 09:07:38AM +1000, Jeremy Dawson wrote: No, but I'm sorry I don't want to be bothered explaining the difference. Try thinking about it yourself. Nice to hear it from somebody who obviously didn't try to think how to quit mc :-) As I believe I said in my original email, I went for the Help function (bottom left hand corner). Why was that such a stupid thing to do? The symptoms that you described are definitely not how mc should behave in a proper system. Maybe you have a completely braindamaged outdated system with faulty libraries. (Btw you haven't provided any details - OS type and version, mc version, terminal emulator, terminal settings, env variables etc.) Maybe you were using a terminal smaller than 80x24. You have to believe: if your system is installed properly, it _is_ easy to find out how to quit. It does print 10 Quit at the lower right corner (supposing you have at least 80 columns). The pulldown menu is fully functional, you can find Quit there, too. The help system is perfectly usable too. If this is not what you experience, you have a broken system. Complain to your OS vendor or sysadmin. Not my version of it - at least, searching for any of the following: Quit, quit, Exit, exit came up with nothing (except searching for quit found the word quite). Mind you I was looking at the man page for mcedit - that's the program that was running, according to ps. And what if you wrote _this_ as a bug report? The manual page of mcedit doesn't mention how to quit. This would have been a useful report. Do you know what my biggest problem is? (And it seems to me that I'm not the only one on this list.) It is that you think you sent a bug report, but that's not true. You sent complaints. And that's pretty different. Bug reports are very welcome. Complains aren't really I guess. They do have a concise guide to the most commonly used commands. It is clearly apparent, in each, how to quit the application. IN fact I've just tried them out - it's easier than I'd remembered. Why don't you? [ and from your subsequent mail: ] Which is why you're in no position to judge whether mc(edit) is more or less newbie-friendly than pine, mutt or lynx. The newbies are the ones to judge that. I've tried them too, and I remember seeing lots of newbie people launching them for the first time. I saw and remember how they judged them. Let's take pine for example. When you start it for the first time, a Welcome to Pine ... do you want to be counted? message appears with a long text. If you've ever read anything about software usability, you probably know that people don't read long texts. Yes, right, they simply don't read them. They just hit random keys, or ask someone what to do. If they read it, they'd know to press E for Exit, and then Q for Quit - extremely logical. You seem to forget that while your mother tongue may be English, it's not the case for many people. Still, pine talks to them in English. They may not understand a single word. When you start mutt for the first time, it probably asks something like /home/foo/Mail does not exist. Create it? A newbie doesn't understand a single word of it, has no clue what it means and what to answer, and no option is provided here to quit without answering this question. Lynx is the only one of these three where it is clear how to quit -- should this be the most important thing you want to do with an application. And I also saw newbies using the basic features of mc without any problem. By the way, IMHO anyone wishing to use newbie-friendly software only should close all the terminals immediately and start using graphical applications. Terminal apps are for those who are willing to learn and experience in hope of a more effective future use of the system. -- Egmont ___ Mc-devel mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: Bugs should be reported to mc-devel@gnome.org
Egmont Koblinger wrote: On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:02:44AM +1000, Jeremy Dawson wrote: A program which grabs my window, from which I can't tell how to quit? You must be joking. sleep 1 = it's just another program you can't tell how to quit, right? It doesn't have docs for that. Do you think you should report that to the coreutils folks? No, but I'm sorry I don't want to be bothered explaining the difference. Try thinking about it yourself. In mc, the bottom right corner shows how to quit, or how to pull down the menu where you can find the quit option, too. You can also invoke the menu with the mouse. There's also a built-in help that documents these. As I believe I said in my original email, I went for the Help function (bottom left hand corner). Why was that such a stupid thing to do? As you wrote, you had looked up this e-mail address in mc's manual page. So you know what man pages are and how to read them. Haven't you found the info on how to quit mc there? Surprisingly it _is_ written there, too. Not my version of it - at least, searching for any of the following: Quit, quit, Exit, exit came up with nothing (except searching for quit found the word quite). Mind you I was looking at the man page for mcedit - that's the program that was running, according to ps. I'll tell you something you don't know - if you want to learn about software which is usable by someone who hasn't been taught how pine, mutt or lynx as user-friendly, and even more, newbie-friendly software??? You really must be joking... They do have a concise guide to the most commonly used commands. It is clearly apparent, in each, how to quit the application. IN fact I've just tried them out - it's easier than I'd remembered. Why don't you? And stupid though I may be, I found them easy enough - to do basic things, at any rate. What's your goal with your bug report? Do you want to _use_ mc, become familiar with it? Or just complain that you were unable to quit and don't want to see it any more? (It seems to me that no-one around here cares about the latter one.) I don't want to use it, as my original email made absolutely clear. I had the obviously naive view that developers might want to do something so that other users don't have the same experience. Some developers are actually aware that what seems obvious to them isn't obvious to the user, so they realise they need user feedback of such things. Doesn't your window have an X button in the upper-right corner that closes this window? Perfect way for beginners to quit any application - usually they find it on their own. Which is exactly why I used pine, mutt and lynx as examples. They open up in an existing window rather than create a new one for themselves. I didn't want to close the window, just quit the program that had opened up in it. Ps. I'm not a developer, just a guy who uses mc regularly and send some minor patches sometimes. But I strangely stare at your mails and can't understand them... I just have a feeling that if 1 out of 1 users (who actually has a university's domain name in his e-mail address) have no clue how to use it then it's probably not the software's fault. I'm happy to believe that some of the 1 uses guess PullDn rather than Help. Since I've no reason to expect that all do, maybe the rest guessed the sort of response they'd get by reporting problems (which isn't so common in the university environment) and decided not to bother. Jeremy Dawson ___ Mc-devel mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: Bugs should be reported to mc-devel@gnome.org
Egmont Koblinger wrote: pine, mutt or lynx as user-friendly, and even more, newbie-friendly software??? You really must be joking... Ps. I'm not a developer, just a guy who uses mc regularly and send some minor patches sometimes. Which is why you're in no position to judge whether mc(edit) is more or less newbie-friendly than pine, mutt or lynx. The newbies are the ones to judge that. Jeremy ___ Mc-devel mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: Bugs should be reported to mc-devel@gnome.org
On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 09:07:38AM +1000, Jeremy Dawson wrote: Egmont Koblinger wrote: On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:02:44AM +1000, Jeremy Dawson wrote: A program which grabs my window, from which I can't tell how to quit? You must be joking. It doesn't, and can't, grab the window. You had to start it somehow. Earlier you said you must have hit a wrong key by accident. Accidents like that happen, but I don't see what the MC developers can do to prevent them. (I'm trying to imagine how someone could type 'mcedit Enter' by accident; clicking on the wrong icon by accident sounds more likely.) As I believe I said in my original email, I went for the Help function (bottom left hand corner). Why was that such a stupid thing to do? Well, it's a rather roundabout way of getting there if all you want to do is quit. Most people would have gone for the Quit function (bottom right hand corner). I don't want to use it, as my original email made absolutely clear. I had the obviously naive view that developers might want to do something so that other users don't have the same experience. Some developers are actually aware that what seems obvious to them isn't obvious to the user, so they realise they need user feedback of such things. As a user myself, I can tell you that user feedback is appreciated here. I've been reading both MC mailing lists for several years, and I don't remember any reports of users who couldn't figure out how to quit. The main MC screen and the MCedit screen both have a list of function keys at the bottom with F10 marked 'Quit'. In this case, I think what is obvious to the developers is also obvious to virtually all of the users. The program has an exit confirmation that asks Do you really want to quit the Midnight Commander?. If you are suggesting that it needs a confirmation that asks Do you really want to =start= the Midnight Commander, I think that would be going too far. It sounds like you had a bad day and didn't see something that was right in front of you. We've all done that. What I usually do is slap myself in the forehead, turn off the computer, and go sulk for a while. Throwing heavy objects at the monitor is usually a bad idea. Anton ___ Mc-devel mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
