The "loop and a half"

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 10:46 PM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> On 07/10/2017 15:40, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 11:54 pm, bartc wrote:
>>
>>> So my programs that use Escape on Windows needed
>>> to use Escape Escape on Linux to get around that.
>>
>>
>>
>> Or you could just follow the expected Unix interface instead of inventing
>> your
>> own.
>
>
> Your job is to port an editor that people have been using for 30 years to
> Linux. The first thing you do is to change all the commands and shortcuts to
> match what is typical on Linux? So that no-one who was familiar with it as
> it was can actually use it?

Is it graphical? Does it use any well-known toolkit? If so, then yeah,
the first thing - and the automatic thing - is that it will respond to
the host platform's keys and so on.

Which is more important: for someone familiar with Program X on
Windows to be able to use Program X on Linux, or for every GUI program
on my computer to respond to Ctrl-Insert by copying something to the
clipboard? Adobe picked the former for earlier versions of Acrobat
Reader, and they suck because of it. (I don't know if they've fixed
that since, as I threw them over years ago.)

>> Back in the days when I used a Mac (long before OS X), I used to hate it
>> when
>> Windows developers would port their software to Mac. With the exception of
>> a
>> few big software companies like Microsoft, who had actual Mac teams, they
>> would do what you do: completely ignore the Apple UI guidelines and port
>> their unfamiliar and arbitrary user interfaces to the Mac software, making
>> it
>> essentially unusable.
>
>
> What is it with those who write OSes in that they have to tell everyone how
> to run the show? An OS's job is to run programs and do whatever the program
> requests.

An OS's job is to let the human interface with the computer. Same
human, same interface.

> BTW, how did the Apple UI guidelines come about; where they copying existing
> practice, or did /they/ decide to come up with something new and
> incompatible with anything else? And if the former, then you ask the same
> question of Xerox or whoever.

I don't know about those specifically, but a lot of what I see today
in Linux is derived from the CUA guidelines [1]. They unified a bunch
of disparate UI controls into what we now expect to see everywhere.
Does Alt-F4 close a program on your system? Does it close pretty much
any program? You can thank CUA for that. Or would you prefer that
every program have its own unique way of being closed?

Oh, and if you say "click on the X in the corner", well, common UI
guidelines is what gave us those, too. Or would you prefer every
program to put a close button in a different place?

> Just look at any interactive page on the web, they all work differently.
> People are used to it. And it allows innovation.

No, they don't all work differently. They actually all work largely
the same way, because their fundamental controls are provided by the
host platform (in this case, the web browser). And where they *don't*
all work the same way (date pickers, ugh ugh ugh), they're a pain in
the behind.

Maybe it's just that you're not old enough to have worked with text
editors that predate CUA? That might explain your confusion about what
should be standardized.

ChrisA
remembers WordStar but none of its bindings, and PC-Type and most of
its command keys

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access