Re: gtk icewm?

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

robert havoc pennington wrote:
> 
> 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.

I agree that a GUI doesn't mean "simplify" in a global sense. 
You don't want to simplify everything.  But I don't think we can
safely say that categorically.  It simplifies (mostly through
making it more intuitive) the *interface*, but hopefully not to
the OS.  I think that's part of the problem with Windows: the GUI
has begun to dictate the OS, not vice versa....moving from a GUI
to a GOS.  (c;

> 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.

Yes.  That's kind of what I was getting at with "scalability". 
You need to let the users choose their own depth.  Make things
frighteningly simple to set up so that GNOME/Linux will still
attract the easily-intimidated new users.  But also set aside a
place (i.e. depth) in the GUI where advanced users can dig in up
to their knees (hopefully with good links to the help system).

It would be nice to design a solid, hierarchial, modular GNOME
Setup, that's not conceptually limited to, e.g., two levels
(Basic & Advanced), but rather an extensible step-by-step drop
from the most basic, clear down to the inner-most reaches.  Make
it modular, of course, so that we don't have to do it all up
front.  

>From there, the question becomes "Do we want it all in one place,
or distributed evenly throughout GNOME & GNOME's applications?" 
Do we want a single configuration tool (or suite of tools), or do
we want to integrate it into the GNOME style of doing things? 
One of the advantages to the second idea is that it would help
unify the configurations for all GNOME applications.  You might
have a standard "Configure..." item on your File menu that brings
up the standard GNOME configuration dialog, populated with that
application's particular list of settings, regardless of whether
it's for the print setup, game options, TCP/IP settings, widget
styles, internationalizations (or not), modem parameters,
plug-ins, and whatever else the user might want to configure.  

This also seems to support the UNIX philosophy of putting the
editables in a different place than the read-only's (e.g. /usr
vs. /var).

I dunno.  Would a tree control be flexible enough for this?  On
the other hand, it does seem like it would fit in with the
concept of themes: user depth would be another theme parameter. 
However, this is probably fanciful thinking, because it would
almost imply a change in the interface for each "depth level".  I
think GNOME would be better served if all the options were always
available to all users (security issues aside).  Just not all up
front....

--John