HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Organization: McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 92 02:40:42 GMT

In article <id.P72T.O1C@ferranti.com>, peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva) writes:
> In article <1992Sep6.060556.14670@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse) writes:
>> 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.
> Or unless you're running Microsft Windows. In which case you can step
> through the menus selecting the underlined letters with the ALT key
> depressed.

Now *that* is sensible, and very much the sort of thing I would like to
see everywhere.  Let someone who knows the sequences use the keyboard.
Let those who wish to use the mouse.  (Even better, of course, to let
people configure their own preferred keyboard sequences.  But half a
loaf is better than none.)

Aak, I'm saying something nice about Windows!  Quick, someone pinch me!

					der Mouse

			    mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers
From: edcrwfrd@unlv.edu (Edward Crawford)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Organization: UNLV
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 92 01:32:35 GMT

What do you mean GUIs arent extensionable? Your example of flipping
a screen with a text based machine and you claimed something like
that cant be done with a GUI is wrong. The Macs system is very 
extensionable. Lets see what i have set up here. I can directly
read IBM disks, umm, i have a extension that sorta reads dialog
boxes out load (not macintalk). I have tons more. And yes,
im sure some of you can name stuff that i cant do, but 1:
that doesnt mean its not available, and 2: if its not available,
it doesnt mean you cant write your own.
From: mellon@ncd.com (Ted Lemon)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Date: 14 Sep 92 21:41:55 GMT

mark@spider.co.uk (Mark Valentine) writes:
>>I've also noticed that (at least with Motif, which has the same keyboard
>>traversal mechanism) that typeahead doesn't really work - if you type your
>>commands quickly, you will inevitably lose due to characters being eaten by
>>the wrong widget.   To me, this sort of UI behaviour is inexcusable.
>Isn't this just a plain software bug?

No, I'm pretty sure that this is a systemic problem - there's probably no way
to fix it without breaking the world.

>>         Plus, I like having the control key in the place in which God
>>intended for it to reside.)
>If your vendor doesn't *at least* ship you a couple of replacement keycaps,
>complain vehemently!

Well, I work for my vendor, so I'm in a very good position to complain.
Unfortunately, I have nothing to complain about, at least as far as the
keyboard is concerned -- heck, even the ESC key is in the right place!   Now
if only I could get twm as my built-in window manager instead of the rather
unfortunately motif-like NCD window manager (as it is, I just run the twm
window manager on the host).   *Heavy Sigh*...

				_MelloN_
--
mellon@ncd.com						uunet!lupine!mellon
Member, League for Programming Freedom | To learn how software patents could
cost you your right to program, contact the LPF - league@prep.ai.mit.edu
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Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.windows.misc,comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x,comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
From: mellon@ncd.com (Ted Lemon)
Date: 11 Sep 92 20:21:59 GMT
Followup-To: alt.religion.computers
 <1992Sep6.060556.14670@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> <id.P72T.O1C@ferranti.com> <1992Sep9.235620.25510@spider.co.uk>

mark@spider.co.uk (Mark Valentine) writes:
>The out-of-the box configuration of keyboard accelerators in Windows
>is something I'd truly like to see emulated elsewhere.  The silly two-
>button rodents which seem to be common on PCs here give me cramps after
>a few minutes use, but I can quite happily ignore the mouse with such
>features as ALT-<arrow> to browse the menus (e.g. ALT,DOWN,RIGHT,RIGHT),
>and ALT-TAB-TAB sure beats grubbing around the desktop the hard way...

Unfortunately, because the GUI has completely taken over the functionality
of the ALT key, anybody who's accustomed to using Emacs immediately loses.
I've also noticed that (at least with Motif, which has the same keyboard
traversal mechanism) that typeahead doesn't really work - if you type your
commands quickly, you will inevitably lose due to characters being eaten by
the wrong widget.   To me, this sort of UI behaviour is inexcusable.

>Although I'm a novice as far as Windows is concerned, I can get around
>it a darn sight quicker than I can the twm I've been using for years and
>still haven't got around to configuring for decent mouseless operation!

TWM can be configured to allow keyboard manipulation of windows.   A friend
of mine configured his twm to accept the same keyboard commands as SunStools.
The typeahead behaviour is also more reasonable, because the focus doesn't
change as readily.

>Most people I point it out to are pleasantly surprised
>to learn that SHIFT-PGUP does the sensible thing by default in xterm

SHIFT-*what*??   I see no PGUP key here.  (Actually, I'm being a bit of a
weenie in complaining about this - if I really wanted a PC-style keyboard,
I could get one for my terminal, but I prefer the smaller keyboard
since leaving the home row is to me just as big a pain as reaching for the
mouse.   Plus, I like having the control key in the place in which God
intended for it to reside.)

				_MelloN_
--
mellon@ncd.com						uunet!lupine!mellon
Member, League for Programming Freedom | To learn how software patents could
cost you your right to program, contact the LPF - league@prep.ai.mit.edu
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.human-factors,comp.windows.misc,comp.windows.news
From: peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Keywords: Mac, Window, Throw
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 22:19:21 GMT

In article <NV2iqB20w165w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (mathew) writes:
> Run the SendPS program.  Select the file from the file selector.  Click OK.
> There, that wasn't too hard, was it?

Yes it was. Too hard, that is. I want to select it, pull down the Files menu,
and select Print. If the printer isn't Postscript, I want it to fire up a
Postscript rasterizer and print it.

> Users want to take documents and print them.  They don't care what
> intermediate printer dump language the printer speaks, be it HPGL,
> Postscript, Laserjet bitmaps or Serbo-Croat.  They don't want to play with
> intermediate printer dump files.  They don't want to half print something on
> one machine, grab the intermediate file, transfer it somewhere else then
> finish the printing somewhere else.  They just want to print documents.

Users want to take documents and print them. They don't care what program
was used to generate them, they don't want to play musical file formats, they
don't want to switch to a different machine because they don't have the
right application/license/whatever on their system. They just want to print
documents.

> SendPS should be supplied by whoever sold you the printer.  Also, Postscript
> is a damn silly way to supply a document anyway, as it's not editable and not
> device-independent.

Editable, no. Device-independent? Close as can be. If it's not in Postscript
or an SGML form how do you know the user has the right application to format
it? We don't all have Macs, you know.

The Mac isn't crap, but it's sure not perfect.
-- 
Peter da Silva                                               `-_-'
Ferranti Intl. Ctls. Corp.                                    'U` 
Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012
+1 713 274 5180                                   Har du kramat din varg idag?
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers
From: neeri@iis.ethz.ch (Matthias Neeracher)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Organization: Integrated Systems Laboratory, ETH, Zurich
	<D05RqB15w165w@mantis.co.uk>
	<1992Sep9.145109.23196@news.eng.convex.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 17:30:18 GMT

In article <1992Sep9.145109.23196@news.eng.convex.com> tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
>[many newsgroups deleted]
>
>From the keyboard of mathew@mantis.co.uk (mathew):
>:"Marc VanHeyningen" <mvanheyn@peach.ucs.indiana.edu> writes:
>:> >Mantis doesn't have a Postscript printer at all.  But if you give me the
>:> >actual document, I can probably print it; we can handle a list of document
>:> >formats as long as your arm.
>:> 
>:> Irrelevant.  Many documents, such as TRs, are "published" as Postscript
>:> via FTP.
>:
>:And very irritating it is too.  Even when I had access to a Postscript
>:printer, I used to get godawful results when I printed such "published"
>:documents, as I was using standard A4 paper.  It just demonstrates once again
>:the parochialism of Americans.
>
>Consider:
>
>    And very irritating it is too.  Even when I had access to a Postscript
>    printer, I used to get godawful results when I printed such
>    "published" documents, as I was using standard 8.5x11" paper.  
>    It just demonstrates once again the parochialism of Europeans.
>
>Why is or is this not a symmetric paragraph?

It *is* a symmetric paragraph and demonstrates why documents intended for
worldwide printing should not be distributed as PostScript.

On the other hand, it would of course be possible to write a TeX-in-PostScript,
and distribute documents in that format :-)

Matthias

-----
Matthias Neeracher                                      neeri@iis.ethz.ch
       "You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun
        than you can with a kind word alone." -- Al Capone
From: djohnson@cs.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Keywords: Mac, Window, Throw
Date: 8 Sep 92 23:53:19 GMT
Organization: =CSE Dept., U.C. San Diego

>The first two characters??  Whatever your chosen "first two characters"
>are, there are plenty of text files that begin with them, and
>PostScript programs that begin with other characters.

They are %!.  I know you can create a postscript program without this
at the start, but I assumed it was a near-universal standard.  This is
in the "PostScript language reference manual" (red book), page 265:
"It is important that every PostScript program start with a `%!'
comment, even if it is nonconforming; otherwise, it may not be given
the appropriate handling in some operating system environments".

Although, if the assumption is made (as seems true on the mac) that
only programs generate postscript, and only postscript will be sent to
a postscript printer, and any postscript saved is strictly on a
temporary basis, then it might be safe to violate this convention.

The method of dealing with normal text files that begin with these
characters is done the same way as you do if you want to print the
postscript as text - run it through a filter first.

>that decision *must* be made by the user somehow.

No, that decision only has to be made in very rare cases.

Hmm, maybe there are a few control characters that will mess up some
postscript printers.  I've never run across the case of a bad-file
format messing one up though, since the printer usually barfs after a
couple of characters (barf is not the same as crash).  (I can testify
that it survives a DVI file ok :-)  I have seen "real" postscript with
errors crash a printer though.  But if a postscript printer crashes
because of something you send to it - then it is *broken*.  (similar
to a C compiler coredumping if you feed it garbage) If the printer
crashes, a simple fix would be to have a driver that resets it between
jobs.
-- 
Darin Johnson
djohnson@ucsd.edu
  - Luxury!  In MY day, we had to make do with 5 bytes of swap...
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.windows.misc,comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x,comp.human-factors
From: peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 22:11:58 GMT

In article <1992Sep6.060556.14670@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse) writes:
> 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.

Or unless you're running Microsft Windows. In which case you can step
through the menus selecting the underlined letters with the ALT key
depressed. It's amazingly handy. I wonder why nobody else has picked it
up. Does Microsoft have a patent on it or something?
-- 
Peter da Silva                                               `-_-'
Ferranti Intl. Ctls. Corp.                                    'U` 
Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012
+1 713 274 5180                                   Har du kramat din varg idag?
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From: einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.human-factors,comp.windows.misc,comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Date: 9 Sep 92 13:41:19 GMT
Followup-To: alt.religion.computers

In <1992Sep9.043446.17852@wam.umd.edu> marauder@wam.umd.edu (Joe Jacobson) writes:

>It's obvious you people haven't seen God's gift to GUI's: namely NeXTSTEP.
>(That's the GUI for the NeXT's computers.  Steve Jobs second gift to the world;
							      ^^^^
>the first being Macintosh, of course).

As in poison?


--
einari@rhi.hi.is
Xref: sparky alt.religion.computers:691 comp.windows.misc:1339 comp.windows.news:631 comp.windows.x:16205 comp.human-factors:2077
From: rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.windows.misc,comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x,comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Date: 4 Sep 92 13:12:17 GMT
	<1992Sep3.220451.13791@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu>
Organization: Human Communication Research Center
In-reply-to: mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu's message of 3 Sep 92 22:04:51 GMT

In article <1992Sep3.220451.13791@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu>, der Mouse (dm) writes:

dm> Until you use a machine with a trackball, or a tablet-and-puck, or a
dm> retinal tracker, instead of a mouse...or if, as I suspect, xcal doesn't
dm> bother to check and blindly assumes a three-button mouse, you use it
dm> with a mouse with other than three buttons.

Gee, isn't all the world a Sun? :-)

Actually, while mutant mice with less than three butons exist, I don't
think software should cater to this perversion without the user
providing a 20 page essay on why they are inflicting such a
monstrosity on the world.

--
rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk				_O_
						 |<
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.human-factors,comp.windows.misc,comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x
From: tjt@blink.att.com (Tim Thompson)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Organization: AT&T
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 17:17:47 GMT
Keywords: Mac, Window, Throw

smr@hitkw14.pki-nbg.philips.de (S.Riehm) writes:
>I figure that GUI's are inherently non-extensible, even those
>wonderful window manager that allow you to define your own pop-up
>menus and so on, can you make this menu beep when it pops up? can you
>make this tear off menu always sit at the back of the window stack
>unless called up explicitly? 

I disagree that GUI's are inherently non-extensible.  It's clear that
very very few GUI's are written to be extensible (in more than trivial ways),
but I think this has more to with the fact that it takes a lot of
up-front effort to do it right.  People are too interested in
getting quick results, so they don't have the time to invest in
building an underlying tool that will make their GUI properly extensible.
The initial investment can pay off handsomely on the other end, but
that is a very tough concept to sell.

Ideally, there should be generic tools that make extensible GUI's easy
to build.  Tk (a Tcl-based shell) is the first tool I've seen that is
a significant step in the right direction.  If someone built a window manager
out of Tk, the extension you describe above would be easily possible.
A window manager built out of Tk has in fact been suggested.

As a hobby project, I'm building a GUI with an awk-like language that
has multi-tasking and multi-window support.  The GUI is fully-extensible,
because the entire GUI (and underlying MIDI application) is implemented with
the awk-like language, all the way down to handling and forwarding individual
mouse and window events.  Interestingly, I'm finding that multi-tasking
within the language has been critically-important in building the GUI.
I've come to the belief that any language with a single thread of control
is at a severe disadvantage for GUI work.

      ...Tim Thompson...AT&T Bell Labs/Holmdel/NJ...tjt@blink.att.com...
Xref: sparky alt.religion.computers:693 comp.human-factors:2085 comp.windows.misc:1341 comp.windows.news:633
From: peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 17:37:31 GMT

In article <RJC.92Sep4141217@daiches.cogsci.ed.ac.uk> rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley) writes:
> Actually, while mutant mice with less than three butons exist, I don't
> think software should cater to this perversion without the user
> providing a 20 page essay on why they are inflicting such a
> monstrosity on the world.

Single-button mice are a pain.

Two or three button mice are pretty much equivalent, with any consistent UI.
You have one button that does the selection, one that pulls down a menu. For
icon interfaces, you get a drag button and a menu button. For radio buttons
you get a default and a menu button. A third button can be used as a "perform"
button, replacing double-clicking.

The way X applications abuse the three buttons is actively painful. A single
button interface that's consistent is actually better... though I still prefer
a two-button interface like OpenLook.
-- 
Peter da Silva                                               `-_-'
Ferranti Intl. Ctls. Corp.                                    'U` 
Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012
+1 713 274 5180                                   Har du kramat din varg idag?
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers
From: neeri@iis.ethz.ch (Matthias Neeracher)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Organization: Integrated Systems Laboratory, ETH, Zurich
	<NV2iqB20w165w@mantis.co.uk>
	<1992Sep6.213030.10658@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 17:04:00 GMT

In article <1992Sep6.213030.10658@news.cs.indiana.edu> "Marc VanHeyningen" <mvanheyn@peach.ucs.indiana.edu> writes:
>Thus said mathew@mantis.co.uk (mathew):
>>"Ken Rawlings" <krawling@banana.ucs.indiana.edu> writes:
>>>         There are two relatively simple things that I want to do on a Mac tha
>>> I _still_ have no idea how to do, even after reading all of the info-mac
>>> digests, and using Mac's extensively. 
>>> 
>>>         #1: Send a postscript file to the printer. Just shove that baby down
>>>             the serial connection to the printer.
>>
>>Run the SendPS program.  Select the file from the file selector.  Click OK.
>>There, that wasn't too hard, was it?
>>
>>What, you don't have the SendPS program?  Of course Apple don't provide it on
>>the system disks. Believe it or not, fooling around with intermediate printer
>>dump files is not something most users want to do.
>>[...]
>
>This simply proves the converse of an oft-quoted UNIX philosophy
>statement:  Because the Macintosh stops you from doing stupid things, it
>also stops you from doing clever things.  Talking directly to the
>printer in some sort of raw mode should not require a special
>application; at most, it should require a special tool.

What is the difference between an application and a tool ?

BTW, for people who really miss their raw mode, there *is* a possibility to
get a raw LaserWriter: Hook up the *serial* input of the LaserWriter to the
serial port of the Mac and access it with a terminal emulation
tool/application. Raw enough ?

Matthias

-----
Matthias Neeracher                                   neeri@iis.ethz.ch
  "... Rice walked out wondering if the world was nothing but wimps,
   pimps, psychos and sex fiends" -- James Ellroy, _Suicide Hill_
Xref: sparky alt.religion.computers:695 comp.human-factors:2087 comp.windows.misc:1342 comp.windows.news:634
From: djohnson@cs.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.human-factors,comp.windows.misc,comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Keywords: Mac, Window, Throw
Date: 5 Sep 92 22:39:56 GMT
Followup-To: alt.religion.computers
Organization: =CSE Dept., U.C. San Diego

>Also, Postscript
>is a damn silly way to supply a document anyway, as it's not editable and not
>device-independent.

Well, believe it or not, outside the mac world, there are a lot of
"documents" in postscript format.  There are also a lot of programs
that create postscript as output.  So being able to print these
easily should be easy to do (many unix printer drivers can automatically
detect between normal text and postscript, converting the text before
printing).

Also, postscript files are editable - maybe not to someone who doesn't
know postscript though.  And they are reasonably device-independent
(though no perfect).  The original document however is not at all
independent, since it probably requires a mac program to convert.

Here's something that annoyed me once on the mac.  Using a mac program
which prints to the postscript printer - grab the output, and save it
to a file instead of printing, then taking that file to another machine
(non-mac) to print.  (ie, the mac didn't have a printer, but had the
software)

>>         #2: See this file sitting on the Hard Drive? Execute it. No, I don't

>Huh?  Run it with what?  You have to tell the machine what you want it to
>feed the document to.  What do you expect it to do, read your mind?

No, "execute it".  Simple.  From what I gathered, it was NOT a document,
but an executable file.  As a non-mac user, I would assume that to do
this, you use change the "type" to executable/application somehow.

>I just copy the .hqx files from the PC disk using Apple File Exchange.

Not simple if you don't have this program, and your local mac experts
haven't heard of it, etc.
-- 
Darin Johnson
djohnson@ucsd.edu
  - Grad school - just say no.
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