New subject: light weight, full featured desktop for audio

22 Feb 2013

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Ralf Mardorf &lt;ralf.mardorf(a)rocketmail.com&gt;
To: Rob &lt;lau(a)kudla.org&gt;
Cc: linux-audio-user &lt;linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org&gt;
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.