Re: [Usability] A Proposal for a new feature

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Rodney Dawes wrote:

> Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2006 15:25:33 -0400
> From: Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Cc: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] A Proposal for a new feature
>
> On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 19:36 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Reed Hedges wrote:
> >
> > > Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 14:08:29 -0400
> > > From: Reed Hedges <reed interreality org>
> > > To: eigenlambda <eigenlambda gmail com>
> > > Cc: usability gnome org
> > > Subject: Re: [Usability] A Proposal for a new feature
> > >
> > >
> > > One thing to consider is this: if you're typing at a terminal,
> >
> > ... you aren't really using the Gnome Desktop anymore.
>
> That's funny.  There's this app in the GNOME Desktop release, called
> "gnome-terminal". I would think that was part of the GNOME Desktop, no?

> Trying to force people away from using the terminal,

You are jumping to conclusions, like as if you are deliberately looking
for an arguement.

> isn't going to make it go away, or make people stop using it. And I
> don't think that the proposal here, or to add spell checking, will make
> it more usable.

It is not spell checking as the shell suggesting "finger" if you mystype
it as "fingre", it isn't any more complicated than autocomplete.  It isn't
a new feature, and if you are already familiar with the terminal on Mac OS
you may have noticed it.  Specifically it helps users recover from
accidental errors in the form of mistyped commands but I assumed it was a
well known feature and describing it loosely as spell checking wouldn't be
a problem.

> It's an application meant for a certain type of user.

Duh.  Thank you captain obvious.

> is meant for certain types of users. The goal of forcing people to not
> use the terminal, is not much of a goal.

You have it backwards.

The goal is to make it so that ordinary users are not forced to use the
terminal, and the similar tasks can be achieved using graphical tools.

By all means make it possible to also do things using the shell, so long
as it can also be done using point and click tools, programs such as Mac
OS Automator and the like.

Are you suggesting it should be a goal to introduce users to the command
line and encourage them to use it more often?

The proposal might be a good idea for a project but if you really feel it
is necessary to use the command line then there are a probably
graphical tools which would benefit from improvements.  In previous years
users would have been advised to use various command line tools but
nowadays the Gnome system tools and programs like File-Roller
provide a graphical way to do things.

The orginal suggestion sounds a bit like Kaptain, a KDE utility which acts
as a graphical front end to all kinds of command line utilities.
http://kaptain.sourceforge.net/
(I'm not sure but i think there exists some kind of GTK equivalent.)

If you are determined to get more people to learn to use the terminal an
interactive tutorial (similar to vilearn) would probably be a good idea,
anything else risks hiding away too much of what you might want to teach
people.

-- 
Alan H.