Re: Politics and anoouncing

[R G Mayhue <rgmayhue@serenesoftware.com>]

On Thu, 05 Aug 1999, you wrote:

> > found joe to be an easy to use editor) by typing "edit" (ie: edit ->
> > pico),  like MS-DOS EDIT. Or use "editor" if the MS part bothers
> > anyone. 
> 
> I vote for "edit". 
> 
Other commands could be used also, copy for cp, dir for ls, etc. Like I
stated before, I think this is a feasible solution, but looking further
ahead, where do we stop. What I mean is, should we pass and convert
command options also?

> > them. When they use any of the symlinked commands, a short reminder
> > could be displayed on the command line informing them of the name of
> > the real editor they are about to use and also giving them a choise
> > to open its documentation first. 
> 
> I don't see much point to this. Though I guess it would help if they knew
> what the "real" name of their editor was. But pico tells you it's name
> anyway.
> 
By "real" I was kind of generalizing, not knowing which editor would be
used (pico, joe...), but by telling the user, they can begin to
associate the actual editor they are using with it's name, instead of
always associating "edit" and never learning it.

As far as documentation goes, I think it's only fair to give the user
a chance to look at the documentation of the editor they are about to
use. And besides, I thought one of Indys goals is to not provide UNIX
answers to Linux problems, and IMHO by providing good orderly
direction, and not let the user hang. I can tell you from first hand
experience, something left unexplained makes for a very BAD experience.

> > It could also explain that by later
> > typing the real editors name, it will be faster then using the symlink.
> 
> Shouldn't make any visible difference.
>
After using the above short cut (Ha!). It *will* be faster!

Using this idea with better documentation will not be so easy to do.
I will volunteer for the job to be (possibly) included in a future
release of Indy, if not just for the satisfaction of doing it and
possibly helping someone to find Linux.

--

R.G. Mayhue
rgmayhue@serenesoftware.com

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