mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Lionel Elie Mamane <address@hidden>]

X-Mood: Rant

On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 11:21:22AM -0500, Mark Arrasmith wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 October 2004 10:21 am, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 09:31:26AM +0200, Nicolas Ratier wrote:

>>> for memory the following keys are the standard shortcut key
>>> bindings included in the KDE distribution.

>> Of CUA/Windowsy inspiration and in total break with any kind of Unixy
>> inspiration. How these people can claim they are developing a Desktop
>> for Unix with a straight face is beyond me.

> Well it is hard to move people from Windows to Linux if they have to
> relearn keybinding.

It is hard to keep your current users if they have to relearn
keybinding.

It is even harder to keep your current users if when going from
version 1.x to version 2.0 half the customisations they made are lost
because you decided they were too stupid to handle that much choice
(Gnome). Insulting.

It is even more hard to move people from anything to KDE/GNU/Linux or
KDE/FreeBSD or KDE/* if KDE insists to have its own localisation
system that doesn't set LC_MESSAGES (or LANG) for non-KDE programs to
follow and KDE programs blatantly ignore the UNIX-standard LANG and
LC_MESSAGES, thereby refusing any kind of integration with the rest of
UNIX in a user-critical area.

But, indeed, if having MS Windows-using people switch en masse to
*/GNU/Linux is the primary goal, and your existing users are to
trampled on, insulted and ostracised in name of that goal, then, yes,
writing a Windows clone is a valid tactic. Another tactic would be to
actually make something better (so that it has other advantages to
being gratis; in the current situation GNU/Linux is more expensive
than MS Windows anyways: MS Windows comes preinstalled and runs on the
hardware you buy of the shelf, but GNU/Linux and the BSDs need extra
time and effort (however small) to install and might turn some pieces
of your hardware into expensive paperweights), something that actually
brings people something. Typical example: Why, oh why do I still have
to press "save" every ten minutes in KWord, Abiword and
OpenOffice.org? Computers are now - by a huge margin - fast enough
that you can make the document feel like paper: Once I wrote on it, it
stays on it. Not only after I have invoked a magical "save"
sequence. (If you don't believe it is feasible: just append to the end
of the file a log of the changes for every keystroke. The cost of this
is O(1) per keystroke. Then, every 5 minutes or every 1000 changes and
when the user "saves" the document and before quitting, do what you do
now: rewrite the whole file.) I feel this is something that would
*really* make it easier to use for the archetypal Aunt Tilly.

> And new users want a desktop environment like KDE or GNOME.  And
> TeXmacs is geared towards them,

I'm not sure what "new user" means. "New" to TeXmacs? "New" to
GNU/Linux? "New" to scientific document creation?

> Right now graduate students in the department complain if I forget
> to install TeXmacs for them because they can learn to live with the
> differences.

I'm a graduate student. And not a 40+-years old one. I'd like to learn
from your graduate students how they do it, "learn to live with the
differences". That's exactly the thing that drives me mad: That every
time a new *version* of "new, we will render the Unices more easy to
use" program comes out (KDE excused here, I never used it much), they
change my keybindings, the way they work and make it more difficult to
bend them to my will. Every time XFree86 makes a new release they have
changed the way my keyboard modifiers are mapped and I have to spend
two hours digging into an ill-documented area to get them to do what
they used to do yesterday, and to get keys marked "foo" perform
"foo". Some versions of GTK+2 also expected me to have my keyboard
behave in a different way than "a key marked foo performs foo",
because for secretarial / accountant, much more intelligent than me,
number-crunchers, it was more easy to have it another way. That's too
complex for me. Differences I have difficulties to "live with".

> But not people who are set in their ways.

Precisely my point: Call me a fossil if you want, but after less than
10 years of using computers, I'm "set in my ways". Making me use the
key to interrupt a program to copy text and the key to suspend it to
"undo" is too confusing. I've just gotten over the fact that emacs
uses the key for "end of input, I have nothing to say you anymore,
goodbye" to delete the next character, don't start pouring other
confusing things in my user experience. I'm a dumb user, I need things
that work simply, reliably and consistently.

-- 
Lionel