Re: [Usability] GNOME Command line interface

[Philip Ganchev <phil ganchev gmail com>]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Shaun McCance<shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 22:39 +0200, SzG wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Yes I agree, there is a built-in solution for each use case. But I'm so
>> extremely lazy that I preferred working day and night on my "go" script
>> instead of having to memorize a few hotkeys. But now it's paradise!
>>
>> One remark: typing "foo" in a terminal will start the GTK application
>> "foo", but you will have 2 problems:
>>
>>     * your terminal gets blocked while "foo" is running
>>     * closing your terminal will kill "foo"
>>
>> But "go foo" will do the job perfectly.
>
> So will "foo&".  I don't want to rain on your parade, because
> this seems like a neat project.  But it seems to me that the
> reason the "start" command on Windows needs to handle programs
> is that it's hard to launch programs otherwise.  It's a solution
> for a problem that we don't have.

Not only. It's also a solution to problems like "What program do I use
to open PDFs again? PDF... PDF... XPDF? No, this is Gnome. Guess I
have to mouse through the main menu... Oh of course! Evince - how
could I forget?  evince mydocument.pdf." Similar problems exist for
ps, all image types, html, "office" document formats, and even text.
Why do I have to think about what program to use, when >90% of the
cases all I want to do with a PDF document is to display it with the
default PDF viewer? Similarly for office documents, etc.

Philip