From: mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Organization: McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 92 06:05:56 GMT

In article <NEERI.92Sep1141334@iis.ethz.ch>, neeri@iis.ethz.ch (Matthias Neeracher) writes:
> In article <YANDROS.92Sep1003712@j-g-ballard.MIT.EDU> yandros@Athena.MIT.EDU (Chad Phillip Brown) writes:
>> (Does anyone know why there isn't a magic key sequence to get to the
>> menubar, for instance?)

"get to"?  The menubar is not a keyboard-useful device, unless you want
to arrow-key step through everything.

> There is one.  It is not very difficult to write an extension for the
> Mac to do this; I wrote one myself a few years ago.  If you have
> normal command of your hands, however, you will be hopelessly slower
> that by using the mouse.

(I assume s/that/than/ in the last quoted line above.)  Perhaps I have
abnormal command of my hands, but I find it far easier and faster to
type (say) ^X-ESC-j than to move one hand to the mouse, run a feedback
loop to find the appropriate item in the menubar, pull down the menu,
move down it to the right item, and release.  And that's assuming it's
not buried in a pullright somewhere.  (I *hate* pullrights.  They
border on impossible for me to work, particularly if there's another
pullright on the item above or below.)  I think this is largely because
I type open-loop, heavily pipelined.  Because mousing demands an
eye-hand feedback loop, I can't mouse open-loop.  (I have used a very
few programs that used a mouse in a manner that let me run open-loop.
In comparison to something like the typical Mac program, I find such
very pleasant to use.)

> I don't wnat to offend anybody, but I think most of the complaints
> about the fixed nature of the Mac UI are made by people who are power
> users of other machines, but casual users of the Mac.

I'm not sure what a "power user" is; to me it seems to be a marketing
buzzword for someone who just wants to use the computer, but is forced
by the abysmal state of software on the system in question into
becoming a hacker in order to get anything done.  If this is what you
mean, I'm not one, though I suspect that I am one of the persons you
are talking about, and my reply to your comment is: damn straight, and
will remain a casual and infrequent user until they get a real UI.  I
don't *want* to have to become a wizard to do simple things like
feeding the output of one tool into another.

(Actually, that brings up an interesting point.  I believe much of the
reason I prefer a CLI interface to the system is that CLIs are, at
least at present, much better at building things out of small hamsters.
On UNIX, for example, I can do a *lot* with sed, awk, and sh, piped
into one another.  This sort of tool-use is utterly impossible with any
GUI I've ever seen.  I've heard of programs that attempt to do it, but
they invariably cost a lot of money instead of coming with the system,
and usually don't do a good job, requiring you to type essentially
everything but the | symbols.)

					der Mouse

			    mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu
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