Subject: RE: [hackers-il] Comments on "In the beginning there was the comm and line"

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 12:33:21 +0200

> Yes, I know about Word macros. You can't really consider them good
> solutions for user interface problems. They don't let you combine
> actions to create more complex ones, they simply record what is more
> or less an abtraction of your mouse and keyboard activity. You can't
> record a "turn the following three paragraphs into three columns of a
> table", and even if you manage the effort to simulate it with recorded
> keystrokes it will be unreliable and unflexible. Don't get me wrong,
> macros are needed features, but higher level flexibility is what I
> wish existed in GUIs.

We are not talking about the same thing in macros.
What you talk about is the macro-recorder.
It died few versions ago.
I'm talking about VBA scripts using the Word object model, and you can do
eveything you mentioned with that.

> > Just like the fact that my dad doesn't know shell doesn't 
> make Linux a bad
> > OS.
> 
> If he is using the GUI only, then of course the shell is irrelevant to
> him. GNOME or KDE have nothing to do with the shell. But someone who
> is familiar with the simple features of the shell will easily be able
> to apply his this knowledge in issuing more complex commands or
> write scripts.

and the point is?
 
> > I don't know about other users - but I have no problems creating
> > automatically many letters each addressed to someone else, 
> from a template I
> > write once. Even if there's no symbol for it.
> 
> That's the way to go. Like styles and hierarchial documents. If all of
> Word worked this way, and thet integrated cleanly and clearly with one
> another, I'd be happy.

It does. Be happy. 
All of word is scriptable and extandable, and everyone I know who worked for
more than 1 year with word has written atleast 3 scripts for something.
Including secratries here in mercury.

I think styles was a good idea that was abundand because however tempting
and markup like it is for programmers,
users never really got it.
Usually people just want the damn thing underlined, not to figure out why it
should be underlined and keep a consistent style.
Their loss, I guess.

And I have no idea what is an hierarchial document.

Farther more, I'm not sure why you keep mentioning them.

> Like auto-numbering. How do you turn it on? Turn it off? Only turn it
> on sometimes? The last I tried it (Word '97) it was unusable for me
> because Word could not know how to assimilate all the commands that I
> gave it properly. So it tried to guess, and failed. Maybe if the Word
> team worked more on it it will work better, but I want Word to be
> flexible enough so that I can get what I want without waiting for
> a full AI engine :)

There are few options:
1) that word had a bug, in this case, there's no point in blaiming the ui
2) that you didn't understand a feature - in this case the ui is to blame
for having a diffrent model than the user
3) that word simply doesn't support what you tried doing, in this case the
ui should have popped some warning.

Anyway, the best way to combine the easy of ui and the power of written
commands is to have what many html editors have: design view and code view.
This case users who don't remember how to number can point and click and
have it numbered.
If it doesn't work, they can go see the code and start playing with the tags
trying to fix it.

> An unneeded feature. A Unix utility is bloated if it has over 20
> options, while Word has thousands. For instance, a --contains flag to
> ls would be a bad idea, because the flexibility that already exists in
> the system lets you do this without a special feature. I wonder if
> word processors can work this way too.

Tell me again that word has more options than TeX and requires more
learning.
I'm waiting.

You can learn nothing from comparing Word to ls.

And see, Word uses the same file search as Explorer, find and everything
else. With the same interface, so users can learn it only once.

And Btw. why does gnu find replicates some of the functionality of gnu Grep
(and vice versa)?

> Oh, they are both complex software systems that let users interact
> with their innards. What I think the difference is that the UNIX way
> of interacting with the innards the same way you interact with
> anything else, while in Windows there are two or more layers of
> interfaces, and it is very difficult to work with all of them at the
> same time.

Yes, but I'm not sure which is better.

---

From: Adi Stav <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 15:01:59 +0200

> eveything you mentioned with that.

Okay. Well I wrote my opinion of why VBA is not a UI solution in my
last email as well.

> > to apply his this knowledge in issuing more complex commands or

Someone who uses shell does not need to learn a new interface to do
more complex things. But someone who uses Word often does. That's been
my point from the beginning. You gave the example of you dad who knows
Gnome/KDE but doesn't know shell. I am saying that Gnome/KDE is
irrelevant to the shell discussion.

> Including secratries here in mercury.

Not good enough. Easy scripting is a useful feature, but it is a
customization feature and not a UI concept. I don't want to switch to
the macro interface or whatever to do sophisticated things, the same
way I don't have to edit a configuration with different syntax file to
set up a command to stand for "ls | sort". 

> And I have no idea what is an hierarchial document.

It's a feature in Word '97 that let you design an entire document as a
hierarchy of sections and chapters, and let you see a collapsible tree
of the structure, and edit it this way.

> Farther more, I'm not sure why you keep mentioning them.

Because I liked it, and I think it's relevant to the problem we are
talking about. It didn't work well enough with the rest of Word for me
to use, but I appreciated the effort anyhow.

> ui should have popped some warning.

Of course. But all of these problems come from the difficulty of
forcing new features into an already overly complicated system, no
matter how well designed.

> If it doesn't work, they can go see the code and start playing with the tags

Yeah! Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS had it even better: you could split the
window into two halves -- the top continued to show your semi-WYSYWIG
document while the bottom displayed the markup (which was displayed in
a very visible and convenient form). BOTH had cursors, and when you
moved they both moved in unison. You could very easily see was was
going on -- tap the key combination for "bold", and the top window
shows nothing, but the bottom shows the two new "b" tags appear and
the cursor positioned in the middle. You could also erase these tags,
as if they were each a single character, only that deleting one tag of
a pair meant the other tag was deleted too.

> You can learn nothing from comparing Word to ls.

I don't know TeX. If you consider Word with all of its actions and
scripting bindings, it might. Anyhow, that wasn't my point. The entire
UNIX environment (including ls) might well be more complicated than
Word, but it works entirely differently. With all of its thousand
icons and menu items, you still don't have a simple way to say "turn
all paragraphs into tables" from the GUI. I'd like to see a word
processor that can. Maybe LyX can.

> else. With the same interface, so users can learn it only once.

That's good. Common dialog boxes is one of my favourite GUI
features. Note that it's exactly the same way how UNIX shares searches
-- be delegating the job to a separate and shared component. Maybe
there are other such parallels that have not been used yet? I'm
thinking that exposing the user to the high level structure of his or
her document can be useful in GUI just as it is useful in textual
markup. Do you think it can be done?

> And Btw. why does gnu find replicates some of the functionality of gnu Grep

What functionality? As far as I know find does not search within
files, which is grep's main task. Do you mean grep's -r? It's simply a
convenience feature, like tar's -z. It doesn't detract from your
ability to type "find | xargs grep" which I prefer.

> Yes, but I'm not sure which is better.

A flexible, simple, powerful GUI is better, but neither have it.