why is it you associate "Unix" with "command line user"? i think
this is quite a bit braindead. Unix is not the command line. Unix
does GUI too, yo.
I've been a Unix user since the 80's. GUI's are for sissies. Give me
emacs shell-mode! :-)/2
I just have to take a moment to note that I find this whole
conversation surreal.
I'm finding it strange to think that "the Unix way" is now officially
some sort of GUI panel that stores static command options. What
percentage of the Unix market is that, I wonder? What happened to
good old scripts, aliases, environment variables and config files?
Or, heck, just typing the command and options into the shell?
It seems weird to me to claim that something other than the command
line is "standard" for Unix while claiming that Mac OS X is somehow
the odd one out. I think of anything other than environment variables
and config files as platform-specific when discussing Unix programs.
That's me with my Unix hat on. Here's me with my Mac hat on:
The Official Rules™ for Designing Mac Software:
1. Never require the user to modify the executable or anything in an
application bundle. They should be read-only for security and for the
widest compatibility (some common system setups make all programs
read-only). If you want to store user-editable, static settings,
place them in a user-writable file in a Preferences folder in the
appropriate domain(s).
2. If you have persistent settings and a graphical UI, provide access
to the settings via a Preferences dialog. There's no sense in hiding
them when there's a perfectly standard place for them.
3. If you want to statically store settings and pass them to main(),
write a wrapper script or executable that reads them from a
preferences file or configuration file(s) and then execs the target
program, passing along the options.
After some consideration, I think it might be handy if Mac OS X did
something similar to Windows, where there'd be a command argument
field in the Info window for aliases which point at executables. It
wouldn't do this for executables themselves, though--programs should
be immutable. In a shell, you wrap a set of options up with a command
by "wrapping" it with an alias or script. Keep that separation. Let
users create aliases to set options.
-- Chris, Official Arbiter of All Things Mac and Unix
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