Moritz, I initially learned GRASS through the GUI that was current at the time, which was much more primitive than the GUI you have now. I quit using the GUI soon after when I realized that it was faster and just as easy to use the command line, that using the GUI required as much knowlege as using the command line and that the command line offered help more quickly and more easily than the GUI.
Obviously your GUI has grown since that time and the current version is much more capable and evolved than the one I initially used. I tried familiarizing myself with each upgraded version of the GUI but generally found them difficult to learn. All of them, including the current form, seemed to share the same basic design. As a result, I'm not intimately familiar with the current GUI. I also have no reason to become familiar with it. I built my GUI gradually over a number of years and developed two basic concepts for it's design. I also built it from the point of view of a capable command-line user. First is that the GUI should be organized and visually simple, not confusing to the eye and it should offer only a few choices at any time. If you're already accustomed to looking at your GUI -- I'm not -- then you probably won't get confused by it's visual presentation. To that end, my GUI is also a one-button GUI wherever possible. I haven't changed things like the Tk digitizer, so that still uses three buttons. I found that restricting myself to using one mouse button made me think through the process more completely and organize it more carefully. Second is that no capability should be added to the GUI unless it can be made simpler and/or faster than the command line operation. In the sequence of development some things were obvious early choices for inclusion in the GUI. It is very difficult to build and manipulate complicated map displays from the command line, so simplifying that process was the first purpose of the GUI. The last major addition to the GUI was mapcalc, which is quite easy to use from a command line, so I had a hard time inventing a graphical interface that was more useful. There are still capabilities I haven't added and some that I will probably never add. I have yet to find a way of setting raster color rules that is simpler or faster than the command line. There are many modules that I don't plan on adding because I have no use for them. Were I to add some of the more specialized modules they would probably go into the background somewhere so that I would never see them unless I asked to see them. Roger On Thu, 2011-04-14 at 11:21 +0200, Moritz Lennert wrote: > On 14/04/11 01:50, Roger Miller wrote: > > Thanks, Markus. I appreciate that. > > > > It looks like I will have three choices; stay with 6.4/6.5 and use a > > dead-end system, move to 7.0 and a GUI that I don't want to use, > > Maybe you could tell us why the new GUI is so unacceptable and what type > of GUI would suit your needs ? Not in terms of every detail you have > tweaked in your own GUI, but more in terms of principles. > > Moritz > _______________________________________________ grass-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev
