[linux-audio-user] Re: E17 - our choice of WM in the future?

[Rob]

On Wednesday 25 October 2006 16:36, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> If you want to print or if you want to run a word count, if
> you want to upload with scp or whatever: It's all there. To my
> knowledge the command line is the most flexible and powerful
> "context menu" invented so far.

I've been using Unix for 20 years and Linux for 12, so for me, 
yeah, I probably use the command line more than the context 
menus.  But we're not talking about you or me, we're talking 
about people who are using "something else" and who thinks 
visually (a GNOME developer would say spatially, but I don't 
necessarily agree) rather than in code.

Even for my own purposes, I end up in the GUI a lot even if it's 
just mc or rox (if I'm using icewm.)  Suppose I want to burn 
600MB of the largest files (out of a directory containing 
hundreds of files and several gigs) to a CD.  This is something 
I do fairly often, with various changes to the criteria, in both 
my personal life and business.  Click the Size column, start 
dragging until the file manager tells me I've got 600MB, 
right-click, "Actions/Create Data CD" (under KDE, dunno about 
GNOME since I haven't been using it long.)  To select those 
files at the command line, I would have to sit there and read 
man pages for far longer than it would take to burn the actual 
CD.  I'd probably end up writing a perl one-liner that called 
mkisofs and cdrecord.

Suppose I want to delete all the files I created since midnight 
in a directory.... I could try to do it from memory 
("find -mmin -1200 -type f | xargs rm -f" as I type this, 
roughly, right?  but I'd run it without the "rm" first just to 
be sure...) or I could do it in like 10 seconds by sorting by 
date in the file manager, selecting and deleting.

More relevant to this list, ever tried to use mp3cut and xmms 
from the command line to trim an mp3 file?  I personally find it 
annoying, and will put up with an additional encoding generation 
just to open the file in Audacity and see the waveform as I'm 
trimming it.  Needless to say, I've never even used command line 
tools to trim a wav file, since there's no downside to using 
Audacity.

People who aren't coders or admins usually don't even have the 
option to remember the commands we learned years ago, and even 
if someone taught them, most people just don't think that way.  
The only way most people are even able to use computers is to 
think of directories and web pages as physical places, daemons 
and files as physical objects, and their dragging and dropping 
as literal physical actions rather than a metaphor.  

In summary: "Well, the command line works fine for me" is not a 
valid counter-argument to "I want to be able to tell my 
non-technical users that they'll never have to use a command 
line."

Rob