[LAU] light weight, full featured desktop for audio

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Fri Feb 22 13:23:19 UTC 2013


On Fri, 2013-02-22 at 08:09 -0500, Rob wrote:
> On 02/22/2013 03:47 AM, david wrote:
> >>>> dwm has both idiosyncrasies and a learning curve, but so too do most
> >>>> "expert" pieces of software. vim and emacs are the canonical examples,
> > Being hard to learn doesn't make something an "expert" piece of software -
> > unless you're talking about a *field* that requires lots of expertise such
> > as rocket science. Text editing isn't rocket science. A text editor
> > shouldn't be as hard to learn as rocket science. ;-)
> 
> What makes something an "expert" piece of software is simply that it's not
> aimed at the layman. vi, emacs and dwm were meant for software developers
> and system administrators to use. And a musician who's also one of those
> things will probably be able to figure out those programs. A musician who
> isn't should probably use leafpad or something like that. Anything more
> involved and they're not going to be able to figure out how to turn on
> syntax highlighting, regular expression search and replace, autocompletion,
> etc. anyway.
> 
> Text editing isn't rocket science, but when vi and emacs were originally
> written, it was computer science. Since then it's just been 30-40 years of
> iteration to make them more capable without much thought to whether someone
> accustomed to Windows Notepad could use them. I've used both for about 25
> years, and have no use for the (to me ill-advised) menu extensions that
> don't really help noobs use them while taking up space on my screen that
> could be used for one or two more lines of code.
> 
> For those poor laymen who have to edit files from the command line, we have
> nano now. I still get questions from people who allegedly have degrees in
> my field about functions that are prominently displayed in its little menu
> at the bottom of the screen. Instead of reading the screen, they've been
> trained to look for File/Save.
> 
> Software meant for the layman but that's difficult to use, on the other
> hand,  is just poorly-written software. (Expert software can be bad too,
> but usually that doesn't last 30 years.)
> 
> Rob

I'm not accustomed to Windows editors, in the past I used all kinds of
complicated editors, such as the first C64 Assembler editors, C editors
for DR DOS etc., but today I expect more comfort. I'm not aware about
syntax highlighting for Leafpad or that it can be used by the command
line. I neither program professional, nor just for interest, but I need
a command line editor to set up *NIX systems and for doing this I expect
an intuitive to use editor, such as mcedit.



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