Questions for deployments of GNOME [LWN.net]

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 12:57 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263)
In reply to: Questions for deployments of GNOME by nix
Parent article: Questions for deployments of GNOME

"I at least consider it a point of honour when supporting software I wrote to try to keep *all* my users happy inasmuch as they don't have conflicting requirements, and not ignoring them is part of that."
The problem with keeping *all* the users happy is that then you'll need to support a million features, a lot of which is useful to a few percent, and just an annoyance to everybody else. Perfect way to get to clutterhell.

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Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 13:28 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (8 responses)

A search facility to search the config dialogs seems like a good idea.

(IIRC KDE has just that, but I'm not in X right now and I can't remember.)

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 14:30 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (7 responses)

You really see this as a good thing? Clutter from featuritis, solved with more clutter?

There really is a problem when you need to SEARCH for the dialogs...

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 17:12 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

Question: which is better, me cursing the system daily because I can't work out how to make it behave in an intuitive fashion, or the clutter caused by featuritis?

As an example, I grew up with systems where Ctrl-U was delete line, and Ctrl-W was delete word. I expect these shortcuts to work, and made the effort to configure the KDE desktop I use day-in, day-out to match my way of thinking. On GNOME, I can't find a way to make Ctrl-W anything other than Close Window; this may be a case of not enough looking, but I'm not prepared to unlearn the habits of 15 years learning, just because someone, somewhere feels that I shouldn't have them.

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 20:24 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (1 responses)

Use emacs keybindings, no problem.

(Yes, some applications have Ctrl-w hardwired to "Close window", that's a bug, but hardly GNOME's fault).

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 22:47 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Even applications like, oh, gnumeric (a flagship GNOME application).

As far as I can tell, menu shortcut keys take precedence over the (fantastically arcane to set up) gtk-emacs-* bindings in every situation (although I haven't yet checked the Gtk source to verify this).

As such, you have to unbind all clashing keybindings in *every application separately* before things work as you expect.

(Oh, and those vaunted Emacs keybindings? You know how many keys they bind? Fifteen. That's pathetic, just pathetic: even readline beats that by a factor of two or three. Not even paragraph moving is implemented.)

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 17:39 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

By this definition, you'd slim down Wikipedia to a dozen pages or so. It's too large and cluttered to find anything in, you know, and search dialogs, well, they're 'clutter'.

I mean, sure, kcontrol is cluttered in the sense that there are an awful lot of settings in there (of course there are: the whole point of it is that *everything* that's configurable in KDE should be configurable from that place if necessary, and thanks to KParts this is done without adding bloat to anything) --- but because there's a search option, that clutter *is not annoying*. You can browse if you want, or jump straight to an option: both are possible.

Computers are good at looking for things. Why not let them?

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 20:08 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (2 responses)

Ok, comparing an encyclopedia with a desktop is just too far out...

The purpose of Wikipedia is to retrieve information, of course you want to be able to search that information.

The purpose of a control panel is to configure stuff. If a search box is needed for that, then something is wrong, at least in my mind.

Search for:[How to change pixelsize of that bar that I NEED to be 3 pixels wide, find it now, or I will not be able to WORK!]

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 22:49 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Simply searching for `bar' or `pixel' would be a good start.

And since it's an isearch-style search box (well, sort of like isearch mixed with M-x occur), you often don't even need to type in the whole word.

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 15, 2006 15:31 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

"Ok, comparing an encyclopedia with a desktop is just too far out..."

Why? Both seek to be comprehensive, target themselves at all users, and are the first point of interface to their respective fields. Seems wholly appropriate to me.

Search isn't just for finding needles in haystacks; it's also for being able to focus on what you want rather than looking through everything, and for being sure you haven't missed an occurrence of what you're looking for. That's useful whether you have ten lines or ten thousand pages to look through.

On a broader point - why should my interactions with my computer be bounded by the limitations of your imagination?