[linux-audio-user] Usability vs Intuitability in Ardour

[Steve Harris]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 10:36:10 +0100, tim hall wrote:
> Last Monday 25 July 2005 22:15, Kevin Cosgrove was like:
> > On 25 July 2005 at 15:46, Ben Loftis <ben at glw.com> wrote:
> > > Most professional audio gear is like a bicycle.  A bike is
> > > certainly not intuitive to a first time user, but once you
> > > learn how to balance, steer, etc, you can get around faster
> > > than someone on foot.  This has sometimes been described as
> > > "intuitable" rather than intuitive.
> >
> > Or, "discoverable" versus "usable".
> >
> > Word is easy to discover for easy things to do. 'vi' is
> > *much* faster, if my 'vi' speed versus the 'Word' speed of my
> > compatriots is any gauge.  Pull-down menus are "intuitive", where
> > as hot-keys are not.  But, hot-keys get the work done quickly
> > once they're known.  Pull-down menus which list their hot-key
> > shortcuts in the menu are quite nice for me.  The Opera web
> > browser is one example of this.
> 
> Thanks Kevin. All keybindings have to be learned. I can't use vi without 
> constant reference to the manual. I dare say the same would be true of emacs. 
> I dislike them both and use nedit for everything, simply because it works 
> much more like a Windows based editor, so I had to relearn less in order to 
> get typing when I first migrated. It's nothing to do with intuitabilty either 
> - old habits die hard.

True, you have to decide wether its worth the effort. When I started
developing on UNIX machines I watched the old hands and relaised that 1)
they were all much faster than me, and 2) they (almost) all used vi. So I
took the effort to learn, in the knowledge that I would spend a lot of my
life typing. It took makes months to be able to fly vi, but now you can
prise it from my cold dead fingers.

I experience extreme discomfort when forced to use a non-modal editor,
and when I have to go through afterwards and remove all the ^[hhhhhhcw
afterwards :)

For anyone whos thinking of learning, dont start by trying to digest it
all, just start with i A yy dd, and go from there, its all pretty
logical when you get into it.

- Steve^[ZZ