Jack Park wrote:
I can't help thinking that any move to a command line for anybody except
blackbelts and ubergeeks would be a step way backwards. It seems clear
to me that MS Word is far more popular than is any editor that requires
command lines to make it work. My comments span the range from Linux
itself to topic maps editors.
In fact, afik, those who are espousing command lines are already Linux
users.
Jack,
I don't think either Sam or I are advocating command lines as a
replacement for average users' use of a GUI. But the command line
offers something no GUI I'm aware offers: command chaining, i.e.,
being able to take the output from one application as the input
into another, which is enormously powerful. Coupling that with a
number of other linux libraries (both GUI and command line) and
there's quite a lot of power at one's fingertips. If TM4J was made
into a command line application (which it *kinda* is via Ceryle,
but could be in its own right), you gain some abilities you'd not
have with any GUI alone. I think the point here is that these
capabilities are not available in a GUI-alone environment. With
Macintosh OS X, you can now use that underlying unix along with
the GUI -- the best of both worlds.
I don't know if there's any way to compare MS Word with command
line editors. Almost all of them are free, have never had a dollar
spent on their marketing, and nobody has ever gone to any trouble
to create "customer lock-in" as they have with Word. But there are
millions and millons of copies of vi and emacs in daily use, perhaps
by black belts and ubergeeks, but actively in use. And as you know,
there's enormous "brand loyalty" with both vi and emacs, at least
as much as with Word (most people I know who use Word do so because
they have to, and often hate it).
Part of the problem with MS Word is its quick version obsolescence
and binary opaqueness, the very opposite of the openness of the
command line tools. I don't know if this is black belt or brown belt,
it's just a different way of working. I still find uses for nsgmls,
simply because it is a command line tool, whereas my copy of Word 4.0
long ago went into the trash bin. vi (vim) and nsgmls are not obsolete,
nor do they ever result in the blue screen of death. I suppose there's
no point in me arguing this though, as given that I've been using vi
since about 1985, I must recuse myself of any voting privileges. And
it occurs to me to look at the belt I'm now wearing: it's black.
Haii- yah! (chop chop motion with hand)
Murray
......................................................................
Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
The midrange prediction shows [global] temperatures increasing by
about 3 degrees. Under that scenario, about 1.25 million species,
or 24 percent of the terrestrial species of plants and animals,
will be extinct or on the way to extinction in 50 years. With a
rise of more than 3.6 degrees, 35 percent of species would be lost.
In Queensland, Australia, 85 percent of birds would face extinction.
In the Amazon, 87 percent of the plants would vanish.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/01/08/MNGU045MCV1.DTL
Asked how he could boast of being an environmental advocate when
he owns five Hummers, Schwarzenegger instead took credit for the
vehicle's popularity. "Eleven years ago, I took the military
Hummer and I wanted to prove you could turn it into a civilian
Hummer... Now, as you know, it's the most popular SUV."
-- the "environmentalist" Arnold Scharzenegger
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/09/22/MN4522.DTL
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