20 Feb
2013
20 Feb
'13
9:10 a.m.
On 02/18/2013 10:00 PM, Simon Wise wrote:
I use mplayer a lot for command line media play. Have used it to extract
audio from videos. Easy to type!
I think it tried one or 2 GUIs for it and found them not useful.
On 18/02/13 10:51, david wrote:
It's whatever shell Ubuntu 12.04 uses with XFCE.
It's the first thing I've liked about Ubuntu, but not enough to use
Ubuntu on my own machines.
One thing I noticed just a few days ago while
updating my wife's
netbook (it
runs Ubuntu 12.04LTS). I mistyped a CLI command, and Ubuntu obligingly
came up
with a list of suggestions for what I was looking for.
yes ... that kind of search if there is an error is nice ... what
shell/terminal is that? anything using readline under the covers gives
tab-completion ... not quite that but it can still save a lot of typing,
and avoid some typos to. Oh, I do
business using words. And graphics. And sound. But
remembering specific
words to the degree of detail needed by many command line apps (how
many people
even remember all of mplayer's command line options, let alone their
suboptions?) Especially when it's not something I do that often.
Certainly big, very flexible programs have big, complicated manpages
with lots of options. Here an interface or a script offering only the
few common use-cases is much easier to use if you don't need the whole
program, hence the many mplayer front ends to choose from. I personally find trying to work out how to use a big,
very flexible
menu and tab interface (like VLC's for example) much more annoying than
finding the options in a manpage.
I don't. (Haven't looked at VLC.) A well-organized GUI guides the user
to the needed option.
Then if the task is something I'll do
again I'll add another line to a text file on the subject,
Yah, then gotta find that text file ...
or perhaps
save a one-line script,
Then gotta find that one-line script ...
or even put in my desktop panel or keyboard
shortcuts if it is a task I repeat a lot.
That's a good point about scripts.
For me its easier to keep a
line of text on file
and remember which file contains that line of text ...
than remember a whole swag of settings nested in
tabs and menus, but everyone works differently.
I could do both if needed. I've even memorized the basic command line
needed to FSCK my hard drives. But for quite a number of years now, I
haven't had to remember a whole swag of settings et al for most things I
do. Even Linux GUI designers are learning!
To date myself: I used to use Microsoft Word 1.0 for DOS. Any guesses as
to what menu it used to save a file?
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://clanjones.org/david/
http://dancing-treefrog.deviantart.com/