Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: [Galeon-devel] native scrollbars (again)

[Jens Lautenbacher <jtl schlund de>]

On Wed, 2001-10-24 at 16:45, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Abe Fettig <abe fettig net> writes: 
> > Some people (hackers, many/most current Linux users) really want to have
> > complete control over their desktop.  They want to be able to customize
> > everything. 
> 
> FWIW I don't think that's really true. "Can't customize XYZ" is an
> extremely rare bug report/feature request in Red Hat bugzilla and
> forums. When someone asks to customize something, it's usually just a
> polite way of saying they think it's broken. e.g. "can I turn off the
> following obnoxious behavior." But then adding a preference is WRONG,
> the right thing to do is just change it.

I can only second that. Finding the best defaults has to be part of the
design process. All system with millions of knobs to turn tend to be
uncomprehensible, and 99% of them show that the design is wrong.

> Anyhow, anytime you think you want a preference, you should instead
> consider whether the current behavior is simply _wrong_, and should
> simply be _fixed_.

Indeed. there is often the fear in free software projects to step on
anyones toes. So a lot of (mis) features/patches get applied, because
"they are only optional". So not only you have the problem that the
existing state of a program is wrong, but over time you have to make
sure that a good design doesn't get bloated more and more.
 
> > Fortunately, you CAN have it both ways: just make "Show Advanced
> > Options" an option, or borrow the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced setup
> > from Nautilus.  Actually, I believe that a while ago there was some talk
> > about making the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced thing work across all
> > applications for Gnome 2.0, but I'm not sure what became of it.
> 
> There's a place for user levels and "advanced" tabs, but I think a
> fairly small one. 

Indeed.

> Moreover, if I'm Advanced, I still want to find the 10 prefs I care
> about on the Advanced tab; I don't want to sort through 300 useless
> prefs. i.e. the same UI concern that makes you limit prefs on the
> Beginner tab also applies to the Advanced tab. Advanced users should
> still get a good UI, maybe just one with more technical jargon.
> 
> The worst kind of prefs are the "make the user sort out how the system
> works" ones, the classic one is backspace not working out-of-box for
> terminals, 

Oh my god. Don't make think about this.

> some more GUI-related ones are in many WM prefs dialogs
> ("focus windows that don't ask for focus," "ignore program-specified
> positions," that kind of thing). 

I'm positively sure that my girlfriend is unable to get anything useful
out of the current sawfish control capplet --- and that's not her fault.

> Oh, a really bad one in current GNOME is the Desk Guide properties 
> dialog. There's just no excuse for this kind of stuff being in the
> prefs. 

You forgot the most evil program in this respect: Anybody who ever cared
to look at emacs and it's customize system will understand me.
I'm a huge emacs fan (and once did my own share of hacking on xemacs),
and still think emacs' news/mail reader Gnus is the best mailer ever
written, but the billions and zillions of possibilities to tweak your
configuration are plain evil. 

Note that they are not evil because they exist, I myself tweaked a lot
with a lot of different options. They are evil because emacs is supposed
to have a friendly sort-of-gui to set options (customize) and noone
actually made sure that there are sensible defaults.

Here Havoc's idea of using the gconf editor applies: It's nice to be
able to customize everything, but please put it out of the GUI for
everyday options, and apply good defaults. I don't want nautilus or a
webbrowser to become just another emacs.