6 Jul
2018
6 Jul
'18
6:06 a.m.
On Thu, Jul 05, 2018 at 04:11:57PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
On Thu, 05 Jul 2018 13:49:58 -0700 "Steve
Johnson" <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
Years and years ago, decades ago, I worked on a time series picker that
had a pretty cool interface. Yeah, it was a GUI tool with all the menus,
etc, but it also had a console prompt because all the menus had keyboard
shortcuts. What was neat about it was that as you pulled down menus and
did stuff, which was a process where you'd go through several things to
get what you want, the console would fill in with the shortcuts.
So if you hadn't used it for a while, using it basically taught you the
shortcuts. It was pretty slick, I wish all guis worked like that.
That's an interesting topic, but it also
gets my mind thinking about UNIX
features that were wonderful but didn't evolve as computers did.
My two examples of this are editor scripts and shell scripts. In the day, I
would write at least one shell script and several editor scripts a day. Most
of them were 2-4 lines long and used once. But they allowed operations to be
done on multiple files quite quickly and safely.
With the advent of glass teletypes, shell scripts simply evaporated -- there
was no equivalent. (yes, there were programs like sed, but it wasn't the
same...). Changing, e.g., a function name oin 10 files got a lot more tedious.
With the advent of drag and drop and visual interfaces, shell scripts
evaporated as well. Once again, doing something on 10 files got harder than
before. I still use a lot of shell scripts, but mostly don't write them from
scratch any more.
With specialized apps there is less need for the kind of
things we used to do. While some of us want lego technic,
most people simply want preconstructed toys to play with.