In a message dated: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 20:17:19 EST
Benjamin Scott said:
>> Locale? I'll let Derek answer that one, though in general, the default
>> is usually C, which is fine ...
>
> Easy for you to say. You speak English.
No, easy to for me to say because that's what the default *is*, and
if you don't like it for whatever reason you need to change it. You
could be fair to everyone and just not set it at all, make everyone
set it for their appropriate preferences :)
>> I'm strictly talking about shell level commands here, nothing more.
>
> Why? What makes shell commands so special?
Because "In the beginning there was the command line!" He didn't
name the book "In the beginning there was the GUI." :)
>Sure, people like you and me might think X11's main purpose is to allow
>us to have multiple xterm's open at once, and thus not care what gets
>done to the GUI. But how does someone used to KDE react when you
>remove the panel and replace it with a desktop menu?
Okay, I've sat here and started a bunch of different arguments about
why command line programs are a different case, and how GUIs are
special, and none of them have turned out convincing or even remotely
accurate. However, I still believe that there is something
fundamentally different in the way the command line works and the way
a GUI works such that there should be very clear and distinct
defaults for command line output vs. GUIs. I can't explain what,
there just is, at least for me :)
Maybe it's that you can have a command line both with and without a
GUI, but not vice versa. A command line is the fundamental essence
of all that is Unix. Everything else has been built on top of it for
the most part. You can use a unix system completly without ever
interacting with a GUI, yet in order to use a GUI, you need not
necessarilly use a command line. GUIs are not essential to Unix, but
command lines are, therefore they are different and special.
>How would most Unix hacks react if the middle mouse button was
>reconfigured to double-click instead of paste?
About the same as [s]he would if you renamed ls='ls -F' or rm='rm -i' :)
> This issue is not as cut-and-dry as it might first appear...
No, but it's as cut-and-paste at it will get :)
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
God Bless America!
...we don't need to be perfect to be the best around,
and we never stop trying to be better.
Tom Clancy, The Bear and The Dragon
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