Maximizing Xcode usability (Re: Setting up searches in Xcode)
Maximizing Xcode usability (Re: Setting up searches in Xcode)
- Subject: Maximizing Xcode usability (Re: Setting up searches in Xcode)
- From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:42:40 -0400
On Jul 26, 2006, at 2:13 AM, David Masover wrote:
Steve Checkoway wrote:
I don't understand all of this aggression toward a command line.
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
His theory is that Mac users hate the commandline because they were
proud to be the first consumer GUI when PCs had DOS, and later the
only true GUI, to the point where the original Macs Snow Crashed,
while PCs (even when running Windows, I think) "went cryllic".
They hate anything to remind them that underneath all the fancy
graphics, there not only is a commandline, but it's essential.
It's like auto vs manual transmission... or a steering wheel vs a
joystick.
This is a delusion some people use to justify keeping access to
certain things exclusively in the domain of the CLI fans. People who
hate CLIs hate them because they can't get anything done in them.
They just sit there staring at them feeling helpless and they hate
that feeling. It's no different than the people who can't do math and
have stress attacks at the thought of taking a math class. My degrees
are in math. Math doesn't stress me in the least, but I taught enough
math classes to understand that some people just don't think the way
I do and they'll never be as comfortable with or as good at math as I
am. The difference is that I don't think those people are inferior.
Too many of the CLI guys think that anyone who isn't good with CLIs
doesn't qualify to be thought of as a real programmer and hence his
needs and wishes shouldn't count for anything.
tool to use. If you know what you're doing, it can make you life
far simpler than you could otherwise imagine. Why bother with a
Mac? Because
Seconded.
I never get people to move over to the commandline, but I've only
met one person who continues to believe that the mouse is faster.
But he hasn't seen my better one-liners.
I think most people who love and extol the virtues of CLIs and the
use of CLI-like interfaces for parts of programs like Xcode
(accompanied by insinuations that any serious programmer would
happily embrace these mechanisms unless he's just too stubborn or
lazy to learn them) fail to understand that people are different.
While some people, yourself included, get things done in Terminal at
a mind-boggling rate of speed, some people just can't do that. Their
brains just are not the same as yours, and one of the differences is
that they have difficulty with whatever is required to do what you
love doing. Maybe they can't type very accurately, so typing paths is
an exercise in frustration. Maybe they have trouble remembering
functions and options that have names created by people with a vowel
allergy. Maybe they rely more heavily on visual thinking than you do.
Whatever the reason, using a CLI is *not* faster for those people.
It's an exercise in frustration and confusion and it always will be.
It's not just that they're too lazy or stubborn to learn how to use
one. And for those people, the mouse really is faster because *those
people* can get things done faster using one.
I've never advocated that the "geek" tools and interfaces be purged
from the Mac, and I wouldn't. I'm glad those things are there for you
and others who can benefit from them. What I advocate is designing
GUI software -- even Xcode -- that runs on a Mac in such a way that
the most people can use it, be productive with it, and enjoy using
it. If this were Linux, I wouldn't advocate this, but this is the Mac
OS we're talking about here. The vast majority of the people who use
it were drawn to it because it allows them to use a computer with
their visual skills. We shouldn't assume that every Mac developer is
a Unix programmer who decided to embrace the Mac and hence doesn't
care about these issues.
I'm tempted to run a test, also -- see who can get Firefox working
faster, the guy on Windows, or me on a Debian-based distro.
Couldn't be Ubuntu, of course, that'd be no fair -- Firefox out of
the box. But really, I dare you to come up with something better
than:
apt-get install firefox
Better is relative. This may be ideal for you, but for someone who
would sit staring at a window in Terminal not knowing he needed to
type this, this is not better than anything. Approach A is not faster
or better if the user can't figure out how to use it or would need a
lot of time to figure out what to type.
Larry
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