No more right click terminal

Alan Cox alan at redhat.com
Sun Jul 17 22:59:23 UTC 2005


On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 12:50:41AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> So what ? They're still closer by an order of magnitude to classical
> text apps than to a GUI in the Gnome sense.

You need to understand why. If you look at UI research you will see that there
are two distinct kinds of interface at work here. The first is one which you
are highly familiar with (eg the checkout). Prompts, guidelines and help are 
buried away in case you forget a detail so that performance is maximised. You
carry the 'conceptual map' in your head.

The other that GUI's more normally reflect is casual use devices. You don't
remember the precise operation but instead the menus and icons on screen guide
you by prompting memories or links with previous experiences or related things
that are not immediately conciously present.

A trained operator can happily look up tickets for flights by typing something
like "LHR>>>YYZ>>>S#" because they do it every day. Its a very different 
interface design goal




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