Semi OT: Unix Philosophy and Accessibility, MIDI Seqs, Editors and Devel Tools

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Krister Ekstrom, le Tue 10 Oct 2006 14:13:09 +0200, a écrit :
>> 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...
> I'm talking about unix, not gnome.  You can very well be a windows
> folk using a GNU/Linux system through gnome, you won't need to have
> the unixish way of thinking.
Hmm, let me insert a couple of comments. FIrst of all, the text-based LInux 
philosophy isn't quite as good as one might initially think. There seem to 
be about a zillion app specific config file formats out there and the 
general attitude is that the user is perfectly capable and willing to invest 
the time and effort to write his or her configs. A unified config file 
format would be good and OK for quick hacks, but the DOS attitued is that a 
textual frontend is always preferrable to config files. Again these are user 
culture differences.

personally, I've got a practical attitude to computing.  I use the OS 
because it's got software I need for doing stuff e.g. driving MIDI synths, 
recording multi-track audio or word processing to mention a few things. ARe 
there any accessible MIDI sequencers for Linux that have a GUI, for example? 
Something akin to QWS the Quick WIndows Sequencer would be preferrable and I 
wouldn't mind scripting either.

In this context of using applications, editing configs can seem pointless 
unless it means concrete productivity or performance boostts e.g. less 
visual clutter, the ability to remove media directly or lower audio latency 
etc... Personally, I think you cannot rely on Gnome full time if you've got 
any special requirements like accessibility. In no time, you must work in 
the console and deal with cryptic commands and imposed Unix philosophy.

I'm beginning to feel that LInux isn't quite ready for mainstream blind 
folks just yet. Accessibility is one big thing: basic Gnome apps have quite 
bad issues, GTK 2 and the up-coming QT4 are the only accessible libs and 
there are lots of folk who seem to think all blind folks like a 
command-language best. I'm not part of that lot, for example, and am not the 
only one.

The reason why I installed Linux this time was to do development work in it 
as I'm attending a Unix programming course using Gnome. One reason for 
staying in the console is that I haven't found graphical development tools 
yet. Eclipse appears to use some custom Java GUI and I'd be positively 
surprised if that's accessible with Orca.  Any tools you could recommend for 
writing C-apps and editing Gnome GUis?

By the way, I've been looking into simple console editors lately and neither 
Nano nor Joe is quite as interactive as I'd like. My DOS memories include 
ASCII-graphical menubars and menus, arrow based commands for marking lines 
of text and MODAL dialogs for setting colors, opening or saving files and so 
on. Is this level of interactivity and visual feedback too much to ask from 
a console Linux app, <smile>. I'm waiting for some Orca bugs to be fixed and 
apparently need to work in the console. Speaking of Orca, someone just filed 
the bug I reported here about Gnome panel crashing. Excellent.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/