On 2008-09-07, Nick Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:04:04 +0100, Roy Lanek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>> Who cares about such numbers, can always astroturf them up. >> >> Agreed ... in part. >> >> On the other hand, consider that becoming familiar and acquainted with >> Ion >> demands some effort (why?--is another story; would all the users not be >> *spoiled*, in the Pavlovian sense, the situation might be different). > > Well, ease of use doesn't necessarily mean a short learning curve.
It really depends on whether the learning effort is comparable the effort the skill saves later on. If you use the program a lot, such as WM or an editor for many in the present audience, clearly learning the tool isn't really that much of an effort compared to how much you are going to use the skill. But when you have to read a book (or two) to disable font blurring, something very basic that you should only have to once on each computer (or ever!), the learning effort is far too high compared to the use-once-and-forget demand of the skill. > they've gone out of their way to make themselves > more Windowsy (or, lack the imagination to come up with anything original, > depending on your POV). More like stevejobsy. Only Mac is as much against user choice as Gnome. > Vim's actually an excellent example of my previous point, that ease of use > != short learning curve. I'm pretty sure I don't know half of vim's > keybindings yet, but the ones I do know make it a lot easier than, say, > gedit. If I want to do something in vim, I'm usually quite confident that > that's because I don't know how to do it (and subsequently look it up) > rather than it lacks the feature. joe <joe-editor.sf.net> was easy for me to learn when I started with Linux in 1995 or so, thanks to the ^K H help screen that stays open while you edit. It still does most I need from an editor, and still use it for all my editing needs. (Used to use jed for a couple of years, with joe-like bindings, but its development has stalled with many remaining problems. Then joe got syntax HL and jed didn't offer anything I really needed. Language-specific auto-indentation is mostly just in the way.) -- Tuomo
