One thing to consider is this: if you're typing at a terminal, ideally you would be able to select options using the keyboard as well (even if interactively as you propose). Taking your hands off to use the mouse disrupts this. "Tab-completion" for example does this really well. Even just displaying a few lines of help text at the bottom helping your remember what to type would be useful and it wouldn't interrupt the user's flow.
There is a shell (bash replacement) called zsh that goes nuts with tab completion, if someone has set up a configuration for a given program. For example, you can tab-complete hosts when running "ssh" etc. Reed On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 01:13:06PM -0400, eigenlambda wrote: > > From: Luis Quintela Garcia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > I made a web-side in order to explain this concept. You maybe like > > to take a look of them at the following address: > > http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~quintela/terminal/ > Those are not the tar options. '-v' means 'verbose', as in, > "verbosely list files processed". '-f' means that the next argument > will be a filename, and for tar to use that file, not stdin/stdout. > '-x' means 'extract', not 'decompress', and its dual, '-c', means > 'create new archive', not 'compress'. > > In fact, where did you get that list of options from? > > > please tell me your opinion about this proposal > I will agree, it sounds interesting. But it seems to me to be the > equivalent of training wheels. > > ~thomas > -- > cartwheel ^(^_^)> v(.-.)v <(^_^)^ > _______________________________________________ > Usability mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
