From: papresco@undergrad.math.waterloo.edu (Paul Prescod)
Subject: Re: IS UNIX DEAD? (very long)
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 08:06:54 GMT

>
>> The point is, until I learned to FTP, make and run,
>
>Well, I wouldn't want you to have to learn anything.  On any other
>system you'd have to learn to contact a software vendor or go to a
>software store and pay big $$ for your favorite editor.  Personally, I
>prefer ftp.

So do I!  FTP is great!  Free software is great!  But can't you get it
through your head, that some people are purely INCAPABLE of learning the
nuances of FTP in less then 2 months?  Or, more importantly, MOST people
have absolutely NO interest in learning FTP at ALL.  I learned it the
first day I was using Unix.  But many people don't ever want to learn it,
any more then they want to understand the internal combustion engine.  They
just want to flip a switch on their computer and have it boot to a nice
editor, without them having to go through contortions:

somehow connect to internet (a MAJOR pain in the rear right there!)
learn about man (since help will probably be no help!)
man ftp
learn ftp (from a cryptic man page written for techies)
ftp to a site (gee, where do they get the site name!)
set the transfer to binary (what's binary?)
start the transfer (even this is a tough concept for a neophyte)
download it to their home computer (oops, they have ot know how to download)
make it (what is make?)

Why not include it right from the box in every unix package, and make it
the standard editor?

>There's always ed, and ex.  Or cat, the one true editor.
>
All of those are WORSE then vi.  How do you use cat as an editor?
>
>And whatever editor you invoke from the shell is also your "default"
>
>
>> Right now we have no standard help key.  I propose a key that exists
>> on 97% of computer/terminal keyboards.  You complain about the other
>> 3%.
>
>Well, first I'd like to know where you got your 97% figure.  Then I
>would like to point out that F keys may not (hopefully won't) be
>around forever.  F keys are nonintuitive junk.  If you cared one whit
>about user friendliness for novice users, you certainly wouldn't go
>around advocating the use of F keys.  You probably like Word Perfect,
>too.
>
I would LOVE to use "help" instead of F keys.  But most terminals don't
have "help" and one of the 80,000,000 PCs who are unixes biggest 
potential market have "help" keys.  Therefore, there is no reason that
F1 couldn't give help in addition to "help."  With 101 keys on a keyboard,
devoting two of them to the #1 interface issue is not a big deal.

>
>
>That's a poor argument.  Either do it right, or don't do it at all.

Good argument!  Good argument!  No standard is better then a half done
standard!  We shouldn't have used VT100 until it did resizeable windows
and background downloading!  Better to have no standard at all then a
mediocre one...NOT.  F1=Help is not a hard thing to learn.  Harder to
learn is: "There is no help because your keyboard doesn't have a "help"
key."  

Besides, this is ignoring the fact that if 90% of the computer world is
used to CUA standard F1-help, it is a defacto standard.


>This half-compromise that F1 is the closest thing to "help" is
>hogwash.  Help keys are becoming more common all the time; abolish the
>F keys altogether on "normal user" keyboards (I'd still like to see
>programmable F-keys on "techie" keyboards).
>
I get it.  And until we've gotten rid of all these keyboards without
help keys, it's better to have no help at all.  Good plan.

Geez.  On one side I have the vi-heads that won't let me make ";" a
cursor key because chinese kanji keyboards might not have a ";" key,
and think that using ctrl-keys is evil becuase some 1970 terminals
don't have ctrl keys on them.  On the other I have you who say I can't
use F1 for help because 10% of keyboards have help keys, and we can
throw out the rest!