Date: Thu, 28 Aug 1997 00:25:32 +0200 From: Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ATT Unix for Windows ! Message-ID: <19970828002532.43939@grendel.IAEhv.nl> In-Reply-To: <19970827093336.NX00626@uriah.heep.sax.de>; from J Wunsch on Wed, Aug 27, 1997 at 09:33:36AM %2B0200 References: <199708251245.WAA23142@oznet11.ozemail.com.au> <19970825204932.12036@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <34020362.7DB1@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co> <19970825224258.55928@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <19970826083051.FR52594@uriah.heep.sax.de> <19970826235525.22143@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <19970827093336.NX00626@uriah.heep.sax.de>
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J Wunsch shared with us:
> As Peter Korsten wrote:
>
> > I find the
> > flexibility that Unix offers with it's pretty free-format confi-
> > guration files rather a disadvantage.
>
> Well, and that's the difference. Once you know the very basics of
> each, you also start to value the flexibility. I could also say i
> hate LISP since writing my applix-mode.el took me three or four hours,
> and i had to lookup almost every LISP primitive in the manual!? :-)
> But then, which language can you really learn within three or four
> hours? It was possible, it didn't make me a LISP wizard, but it
> offered me the ability to get done what i wanted to get done (a
> certain form of formatting required for an ApplixWord document, mostly
> the line breaks in a fairly strict and backslashified form as Applix
> did expect them). I don't believe any MS-Win editor (not counting a
> Windows port of Emacs, of course :) would have allowed me to get this
> done at all, simply since their developers didn't take into account
> that someone else might have such a weird request at some time. (Even
> worse, Windows apps tend to ship their own editor each, which is
> usually much inferior. Think of regular expression search and
> replace, something i have yet to see any replacement for. I don't
> appreciate regexp's being write-only, but i simply haven't seen
> anything else that would offer at least 50 % of their power at a less
> cryptic syntax.)
(No, I can't cut into the above.)
Perhaps you shouldn't take a certain application as your starting
point and say "I miss some options, I want to build them myself"
but start from a different application. _Many_ people use MS Word.
Not that it's the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel,
but it does have many options (and even a programming language
that's powerful enough to write a virus in :) ).
> > For the project I was talking about, I've made a clever (though
> > rather simple) Makefile, that takes the input files (I saw no way
> > to take all .c files with the standard - not Gnu - make) and creates
> > the names of the .o files out of it. It also does something with
> > Yacc.
> >
> > In VC++, I just add all the .c files into my project.
>
> So, why didn't you do:
>
> SRCS= foo.c bar.c mumble.c grammar.y lexer.l
> OBJS= $(SRCS:S/.c/.o/)
>
> [rest of Makefile removed]
Er, that's actually what I did. :) I put the objects files in a
'.for' loop. I wanted something like '*.c' but it wouldn't work.
> That's basically all that's needed in your case. I fail to see why
> this is much more complicated, except of the OBJS deference rule --
> which i had to lookup in the man page, but which you can also express
> manually like:
>
> OBJS= foo.o bar.o mumble.o grammar.o lexer.o
It's not really more complicated, it's more work. I have to make
a seperate Makefile (with the chance of errors) and edit that
when I add a file to my project.
> make(1) has a fairly complex set of pre-defined rules, like the
> knowledge how to compile a .o file from a .y or .l file. So far, so
> good. Now consider that you've got a GIF image that should be
> included as a (for example) X11 bitmap. How do you do this in VC++?
I insert a bitmap object, I suppose. A menu brings up a select box
with graphical representations of objects you can insert.
> Here's the solution for make(1):
>
> [example deleted]
>
> With the above four additional lines, every time you edit myimage.gif,
> it will be re-computed, and cause a recompilation of foo.o and myprog.
> (I've used ${.IMPSRC} and ${.TARGET} since they are easier to memorize
> than the historic names you gotta use with SysV's make(1). Yes,
> there's some legacy around in Unix, but wonder how much legacy will be
> around after 25 years of Windows? :)
Hmm, I used them as well. I might get back to the old, awkward $@
style if it fails on other Unixes with other makes.
> > X is an improvement over the text
> > interface that preceded it, but it misses the integration, like a
> > uniform interface and drag-and-drop.
>
> You can get a uniform interface (CDE). I hate it, and every time i
> had to work with this interface, i had to search everything. Does
> your (wooden) desktop really look like your neighbour's? No? If so,
> why are people proud that their electronical desktop looks like their
> neighbour's? People have different personalities, so why aren't they
> allowed to have different preferences (and *not* just only expressed
> by a differently ugly-looking set of colors)? We aren't at the army
> here. I usually can also work at my colleague's X11 desktop, but i
> don't prefer doing it, since he's developed a totally different layout
> which fits him better. He hates working at my machine since he
> doesn't even find the German umlaut keys -- my keyboard mapping is
> fairly different, since i prefer it being this way. I think i would
> have a hard time to tell MS-Win about my keyboard mapping preferences.
> (I once convinced MS-DOS of it, by writing an entire keyboard
> interpretation layer. Ugh. In X11, i just define a piece of metacode
> for the xkb map.)
Why did you write your own keybaord mapping? Wasn't there a
suitable mapping available? There certainly is a German keyboard
mapping for Windows. Perhaps not the mapping you use, but I don't
know whether you were dicontent with the mapping offered or that
no mapping was available at all.
Talking about desktops: I have a very personal desktop with NT,
that looks totally different from what everybody else uses at the
office. (For the insiders: color scheme Rainy Day, background Blue
Monday, automatically hiding taskbar on top, small icons, and
shortcuts to all drives on my desktop, together with Netscape and
the mandatory icons.)
My user interface with X looks _exactly_ the same. Actually, this
is pretty funny. The difference is the 'FreeBSD' bar with the
daemon in my Start-menu. :) (Plus the layout of said menu, plus
the dock with some buttons.)
Of course, it's easier to adapt FVWM'95 to Windows than vice
versa. But the fact that you can control every action associated
with a mouse move or drag, according to where the pointer is,
isn't an advantage. The more options, the more difficult it is
to learn _and_ to put it in a GUI. Isn't it a bit strange that
the configuration of most X-applications is done in a text file?
But the point I was making was not that the screen should look
the same on every system, but that applications should be build
and respond in the same way. First the File menu, with New,
Open, Save, Save as, Print, and Quit. Then the Edit menu, etc.
If you exit the program, it should point out if there's unsaved
data. If there isn't, it should remain quiet (not the dreaded
'Are you sure?' box).
Every decent program on Windows, Mac, or Amiga works this way.
If someone thinks every program should have it's own user
interface, he's nuts. 'Lightwave 3D' from Newtek is such an
example. They had some totally non-standard GUI on the Amiga
and _still_ have it on Windows.
And yet, this is the situation in Unix and X. The '-f' option
in ls does something entirely different in 'rm'. No two X
programs behave alike.
> > So the developers may like a text interface, many people don't.
>
> Developers like graphical interfaces as well. I much love X11's
> simple cut&paste functionality, something i always found terrible to
> use in other environments. (Note that X11 also provides for the
> semantics for e.g. image cut&paste, yet only very few applications use
> it. That is sad. Even offering multiple choices for the selection is
> supported, so the target application could select either image or
> text, whatever fits better.) I prefer a graphical layout editor (like
> xf) when designing a graphical application. But i wouldn't the heck
> use a horri^H^H^H^H^Hsimplified text widget, and call it `editor', in
> order to fill in the application's ``meat''. Once the layout is
> ready, i'm simply using the editor of my choice again to write the
> procedures behind the graphical surface.
X is not a real graphical user interface as Windows is. Many
applications are tty-oriented applications with extra X-support.
Orthogonality (left mouse button is select, right mouse button is
(context-sensitive) menu) isn't there. It can be build - X is
flexible enough for that - but I'm to see it happen. With _all_
decent applications supporting it, that is.
Of course, flexibility has it's advantages. But Joe Sixpack can't
install and setup FreeBSD and X in the same way as he can Windows.
When - not if - the moment arrives that NT is as capable as Unix,
you'll see that the relative ease with which you can setup things
(you still need to know what you're doing, though) will give Unix
a very hard time.
- Peter
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