No more right click terminal

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 14:32 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Jul 13, 2005, Colin Walters <walters at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > Think of it this way: what if GNOME's historical audience had been
> > musicians?  Then the right click menu might have had 
> > "Open Musical Score Composer".  Having that makes as much sense to the
> > general population as "Open Terminal" does.
> 
> FWIW, when I first introduced Cygwin to a musician friend of mine, he
> absolutely *loved* the ability to issue commands without having to
> point and click, and the ability to write scripts to automate common
> or repetitive tasks.

If your friend can write scripts, that means he or she has a level of
technical knowledge we can not expect of all users.

> Terminals should not be thought of as power-users only; they're useful
> for everybody.

Completely, totally disagree.  Every time a non-developer/non-sysadmin
has to use the terminal for something is a bug.

>   Perhaps our desktop approach should take a stance
> similar to AIX SMIT (sp?), a system administration front-end that
> would not only enable you to perform various tasks with a point&click
> interface, but *also* let you know the commands it was running to
> perform those tasks.  

Let me suggest something to you - what if we took an stance with GCC
where when it compiled C code, it popped up a curses application which
told you how you could be writing by hand the assembler it was
generating and how it was doing.  Here's how the register allocator
works, here's how it optimized away variable x, etc...

Now, I happen to be one of the people who is in the target audience for
GCC.  The entire reason I use GCC is because I don't *want* to know or
care about assembler.  Just like our desktop, for the vast majority of
people, GCC is a tool they use to get a job done, not something they
care to know the internals of.  The curses/GCC thing would be extremely
annoying at best for people just trying to get a job done, exactly like
your suggestion of desktop commands would be.

> I'm told Autocad is very much like this as well,
> and even architects without any prior programming expertise end up
> being able to automate tasks using the lisp-based programming
> interface, which is one of the features that makes it so powerful.

Autocad is a very specialized tool for a particular audience.  You can
probably assume that most of its users spend 8 hours a day for years in
front of it and that any time they can save helps a lot.

The same is not true in general.  It is not worth the time for most
users to learn how to program just so you can save a few seconds off
your OpenOffice usage or whatever.

Don't get me wrong: it *would* be nice if we had an equivalent to
AppleScript so somewhat technically inclined users could script apps for
relatively obscure use cases.  But that's no substitute for actually
fixing the desktop to just work for the major cases.

> This gave you the option to remain clueless 

I think this reveals a lot about how you think about our target users.
If you consider them "clueless" and think that they have some need to
know how computers work and how to program or else they're stupid, that
strikes me as rather negative and arrogant.

Personally, I think *we* are the clueless ones, who spend all of our
time in front of computers learning how they work.  The truly smart
people are the ones who became surfing instructors at some beach in
Hawaii and rarely see a computer.

People in general want to use the computer to do their work, send email
occasionally or something, and could care less how they work at all (and
definitely don't care to learn how to program).

You'd think this would be common sense...I feel pretty silly even
explaining it.

> Did it change?  I didn't notice any changes whatsoever in my panel.
> Sure enough, I would, should I wipe out all of my gnome settings and
> started from scratch, I guess.  (Un?)fortunately there's no easy way
> to track the defaults while keeping the settings you've overridden,
> AFAIK.  Open Terminal, OTOH, has changed regardless of my settings.

True; but the change is a benefit by default to most users, so we need
to have it enabled by default.  You can express your preference for
having terminal easy to access by installing nautilus-open-terminal or
adding a hotkey for it or whatever.