Re: gtk icewm?

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Mon, 18 May 1998, Stephanos Piperoglou wrote:
> 
> And another thing about scalability: Yes, the GUI means you don't have to
> type in everything at the command line, but we also need the power to do
> this. This is the Unix world. Most of GNOME's users, at least initially,
> will want to be able to customize, tweak and control their environment to
> death. We want customization to the extreme, and compatibility with things
> that people know. 

Agreed, as long as we have time to do it. There are always tradeoffs and
priorities. Can't have everything...

> A GUI doesn't mean *simplify*. 

IMO it does in the case of GNOME, at least in part. Making Unix (esp. 
Linux)  usable for average people is an explicit design goal. If it isn't
relatively simple to use, it's broken, as far as GNOME is concerned.

One way to compromise on this issue is to have "easy" and "advanced"
modes, or "easy" and "advanced" menus/notebook tabs. Or to have advanced
features accessible from scripting languages or the command line. Netscape
uses both of these strategies.

> It means make the interface faster, but also more efficient. One of the
> things lacking in GNOME right now is easy customization, i.e. the
> panel's main menu. We need a quick and easy way to add and remove
> applications, icons and so on. 
> 

This is on the TODO list, but no one has done it yet. One proposal is to
use a special folder a la Windows/Mac and use gmc as the config tool.

Havoc Penninton ==== http://pobox.com/~hp