Baslinux mailing list

["James Miller (office)" <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Day Brown wrote:
>
> Dos text editors began with color bars with the CGA; by the time
> DEXTER.EXE came out, the dashboard had evolved to meet the real needs of
> typists & authors. I dunno why all the Linux terminal mode text editors
> I've seen are all monochrome; I dunno why they didnt have color scrollbar
> pulldowns with contextual help rather than having to use  man info and
> page thru hundreds of lines.
<snip>
> It couldda been done in Linux, but the rush to the GUI missed it. And yes,
> the CLI can be a lot faster and more powerful, but ANSI color menus in 50x
> 80 would be a lot easier for newbies to pick up on, but also have a lot
> more *content* and contextual clues with scrollbar pulldowns. If you want
> buttons and sliders you can do that too, a kind of training wheel system.
> error messages with a red background,configuration changes invert the
> usual color.  In the documentation, the keys which the user is expected to
> type after a prompt are in red.  Instructions have been to gurus and
> sysads who knew the [comventions] of the <brackets | options>; newbies
> need a better clue. Color can do that, the Linux CLI is more boring and
> limited than it needs to be.

I think it's because, by the time really useable Linux text editors began
to appear the mad rush to the gui was in full swing.  No one had an
interest in developing nice console features for those apps: they wanted
to put all their efforts into developing a nice gui front-end.  That's my
perception, anyway.  I've discovered that, sadly, Linux has no counterpart
to the old Wordperfect 5.2 I used to use on a 286 in console mode.
Ncurses seems like it could allow someone to develop really nice
console mode features like you're talking about, but no one wants to do
that kind of programming anymore.  Everyone wants to write the nicest gui
frontend for their app and to have it run under X.
>
> would help the Linux newbie. But from the comments I've seen from Linux
> developers, they dont really have much experience with dos, so they dont
> know. As I see so often with the idea that you cannot multitask in dos. If
> any of them had actually bothered to install DRDOS 7, they would see the
> 'multitasking' option in the setup process.
>
I'm not a developer, but I did install DRDOS 7 and saw something about
multitasking.  I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to work though
(still don't know).  In that respect, from the perspective of the newbie,
DOS multitasking and Linux multitasking are equally opaque.

James