[LAU] light weight, full featured desktop for audio

[Ralf Mardorf]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at rocketmail.com>
To: Rob <lau at kudla.org>
Cc: linux-audio-user <linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org>
Subject: Re: [LAU] light weight, full featured desktop for audio
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2013 14:36:53 +0100

On Fri, 2013-02-22 at 14:23 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> 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.

PS: Nano isn't available for all minimal Linux and not available for the
FreeBSD basic system. It's hard enough that I always have to start with
a wrong keyboard map. Editors such as Nano often have to be installed,
the default often is vi(m), so before you can install Nano you often
need to use vi(m) first.