Re: Unity redefines F10

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Sat, 30 Apr 2011, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:

> On Sat, 2011-04-30 at 09:27 +0200, Piotr Ozarowski wrote:
>
> > yeah, I don't understand why they all do not include mc even in the "<=
> > 200 MiB" installations. The system is not usable without mc after all.
>
> Hi Piotr!
>
> Actually, do you know what are the criteria in place for making the
> selection? The popcon data or what? 
>
> I've seen people filling a whishlist bug against Ubuntu, but given that
> these distro bastards are consistently making the system less usable by
> keyboard people to the benefit of mouse draggers (one recent achievement
> was a brilliant change in the /etc/inputrc, which hasn't been modified
> for years!), I think there is little chance it will ever get there...
>
> I'm pretty sure the pointing devices wiseguys own the joints all over
> the place, and they might even be already on my track now that I am
> denouncing this publicly... <g>

Yury,

First: 

Not all the distros are the same about things like this. Tried Slackware 
lately, which is still going strong after all these years?

Second:

There really are problems to solve as far as keymappings are concerned. 
To me, it seems that the big issue is the switch over to Unicode. As one 
consequence of this, some of the MC keymappings are really messed up in 
the X environment unless one takes some kind of special action. Most 
particularly, the ones involving Alt- combinations. I wonder if there are 
any long-range plans to deal with that.

Third:

The issue of other keyboards besides American or English is a serious one. 
The message about the Hungarian keyboard strikes rather close to home. My 
wife is Hungarian. She decided years ago to "adjust" to the US keyboard, 
on the grounds that not to do so would have made things even worse. 
But it took her a while at the beginning. I do not know if you know that 
the "y" and "z" key locations are opposite to what is done in English? 
This dates back to the days of the bread-powered typewriter.

As to your complaints about "mouse draggers" I am not sure I would have 
indulged in your colorful language, at least not in print. But 
unfortunately, the "mouse draggers" as you refer to them seem to act in 
total ignorance of the traditional strengths of Linux and its predecessor, 
Unix. In this apparent ignorance, they have tended to do rather too many 
things which are in-one's-face. The following describes one of the 
consequences of this wilful ignorance:

An application program should be willing to coexist with the directory 
hierarchy which exists on a user's machine instead of telling the user 
where things are supposed to be kept. If one goes to a certain directory 
where one keeps files of type X and starts application X_processor, then 
X_processor ought to look for its fodder in $PWD, as the first default. 
Some applications with graphical content are good about this. But some 
otherwise very nice applications (office suites, for example, and some 
image viewing programs) fail miserably, and quite consciously so. The 
designers have decided so (and have sometimes told me so when I submitted 
bug reports) based upon the "design philosopy" of the project. What that 
boils down to is that the "design philosopy" of their project presumes to 
tell me how I am supposed to organize the files and applications on _my_ 
computer instead of letting me make my own decisions about that. I don't 
think that is funny. The similar behavior of Windows 95 was one of my main 
motivations to seek out Linux, way back in 1996.

Alas, all of the above is so unnecessary. All that would be needed would 
be for a few of the "mouse draggers" actually to learn something about the
history and origins of the operating system and environment which they 
claim to be improving, and then everyone could be much happier. 

Theodore Kilgore