As for the DOS prompt, and maybe the other dos users can offer an opinion, but I dont spend much time looking at it. Most of the time what I see instead is DW or DC file manager's menu. DW has some hotkey stuff that I need to take advantage of, but til then, when I do see the dos prompt I usually type one or two letters: SCSI C:\a (I type the lower case 'a' and it launches DW to show me what is on the floppy. the 'SCSI' reminds me that I booted from that drive so that 'C:' is the scsi. had I booted from the IDE it might look like: 3GIG C:\ or 256MEG C:\ for an old dos backup drive. then the single letters, c, d, e, f, all look at some other hard drive, a ramdrive, or the cdrom with DW or DC. SCSI C:\aa launches Arachne. 'npt'- neopaint, 'mdr' modem doctor, 'rar'- the archiver. 'dr' DEXTER, or 'ed' -SLED.COM the former handles all 500 pages of PLOTINUS without a blink, and the latter I use to write these little batch programs; it will also hack binaries. I dont imagine that any idiot could write a set of mnemonic batch programs for the tools he commonly uses... but anyone smart enough to be on this elist should be.
I would imagine that this could be done with Linux. But right now, I am still learning what the GUI menus can do, and they can do so much, it'll prolly be a while before I can get a round TUIT. Corel, for one, had a fairly simple method of clicking on the title bar of any app called from the pullup 'start' menu. This click opened up another menu where you could select an icon for the desktop. If it also offered a hotkey choice to launch, that'd be elegant. That is what Arachne does during 'SETUP'. The fact that Linux apps do not is indicative of their mindset, glued to the GUI at the expense of maximizing functionality. I wish they would, and expect that someone will eventually figure it out. By and large the GUI is like the 58 Olds, fashion demanded that they slap on more chrome, with more attention paid to presenting the trendiest color scheme. This is not intrinsic to Linux. But it is endemic of the kind of software that the ordinary users are presented with. Complaints about it here might help to get them on the stick instead of the schtick. I can only hope. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
