No more right click terminal

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 13, 2005, Colin Walters <walters at redhat.com> wrote:

> Think of it this way: what if GNOME's historical audience had been
> musicians?  Then the right click menu might have had 
> "Open Musical Score Composer".  Having that makes as much sense to the
> general population as "Open Terminal" does.

FWIW, when I first introduced Cygwin to a musician friend of mine, he
absolutely *loved* the ability to issue commands without having to
point and click, and the ability to write scripts to automate common
or repetitive tasks.

Terminals should not be thought of as power-users only; they're useful
for everybody.  Perhaps our desktop approach should take a stance
similar to AIX SMIT (sp?), a system administration front-end that
would not only enable you to perform various tasks with a point&click
interface, but *also* let you know the commands it was running to
perform those tasks.  I'm told Autocad is very much like this as well,
and even architects without any prior programming expertise end up
being able to automate tasks using the lisp-based programming
interface, which is one of the features that makes it so powerful.

This gave you the option to remain clueless if you wanted to, but also
to learn the underlying infrastructure if you chose to, such that you
could perform the same commands more efficiently afterwards, even in
situations in which a GUI is not an option.

The GUI shouldn't be the whole picture, it's just part of the picture.
Every user interface should expose a model through an API in a
powerful scripting language that enables people to automate tasks
should they choose to (*).  Point&click is just *way* too annoying for
things you have to do often and/or repetitively.  Letting people learn
the underlying API through point&click brings the best of both worlds.

(*) Although I always believed this, Scott Collins confirmed that in
his talk at FISL 6.0, ``Building User Interfaces that Work''.

Sure enough, the underlying API needs not be shell-based.  But you
pretty much need a terminal to run python or whatever other scripting
language your API is designed for.

> With respect to the interface changing; that's true, but it seems to me
> that the GNOME/Fedora interface has been changing substantially in other
> ways (e.g. panel revamp from FC2->FC3)

Did it change?  I didn't notice any changes whatsoever in my panel.
Sure enough, I would, should I wipe out all of my gnome settings and
started from scratch, I guess.  (Un?)fortunately there's no easy way
to track the defaults while keeping the settings you've overridden,
AFAIK.  Open Terminal, OTOH, has changed regardless of my settings.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}