A Bit OT: Making the Command-Line Friendlier (DOS-Background, Long)

[Krister Ekstrom]

On Mon, 2006-10-09 at 20:49 +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Veli-Pekka Tätilä, le Mon 09 Oct 2006 21:21:16 +0300, a écrit :
> > You need text config files and the shell as soon as something does
> > not have a front-end or is not thought to be important enough to be
> > configured by the average user.
> 
> Well, at least you have a relatively simple text config (with doc).  On
> windows you'd have to dig into the registry...
> 
True, but in Linux  you also have Webmin, which can configure much of
the system from a web interface.

> > > Manual pages are reference documentation (
> > Arrgh, that's quite bad really. Fortunately GUI apps have a sounder 
> > philosophy in this. No-one expects you to absolutely master an app based on 
> > a pure menu reference, for example. I know the comparison is a bit unfair 
> > but needless to say, I really don't liek this philosophy.
> 
> But once learned, this is a very efficient approach.  Yes, it means
> learning.  Well, yes, bare unix will probably be for programmers for
> long.
> 
Yes and it's sad because unix/Linux is a powerful system but unless it
doesn't get user friendlier, which it works on, it's gonna be kinda hard
to convinse windows folks to leave Windows... 

> > > unfortunately) few people know. Type info coreutils for instance, for
> > Thanks, will try that. HOW widely are these available?
> 
> What do you mean by "widely"?  Any distribution will for sure provide
> them.  Now, do all packages have such documentation?  GNU packages, yes,
> because that's in their development policy.  Else, not so much,
> unfortunately.
> 
And in some cases, the info pages point to man pages.

> BTW, maybe you'l find pinfo easier for browsing info pages.
> Thanks for the tip. Have installed it now and will have a look at it.

> > > Mmm, I can't remember exactly which one this was, maybe mc (midnight
> > > commander) and other such tools may fit your needs?
> > I tried MC a couple of days back and my WIndows screen reader didn't track 
> > the focus in the terminal emulator. It is probably quite a complex app for 
> > console screen readers.
> 
> Oh, maybe you should use the accessible version which has proper cursor
> routing: amc.
> 
Where can you obtain this? I checked but Ubuntu didn't have it.
On another not, would it be at all possible for Brltty to have some kind
of option to track other cursors than the standard system cursor, for
example the soft cursor found in MC?

> > The Norton tree is simply a scrolling ASCII tree of directories in which you 
> > can navigate with arrows and go to a dir with enter.
> 
> Ok.  I don't know such program.
> 
There's a simple file manager whos name i can't quite remember, but i
think it was something like Pilot.
-- 
/Krister