jmorriso@fs0.ee.ubc.ca (John Paul Morrison) (07/02/90)
Well, now that I have Windows, I guess I should be reading this newsgroup. I have seen a lot of postings of problems with windows. Well, I haven't really had any!! The com port works with the modem. Printers ok. There are bugs of course, but none of Micrsofts stuff seems to crash the system. I am running in standard mode, and I have been pretty impressed with performance, and the multitasking, and all I have is 1 Meg of extended memory bove 640k convetnional. For my needs, this works pretty good. Now for the griping!!! I have used Unix and DOS for quite a while now, and I can still do alot of things faster and easier in a command line format. Standard mode will not let you run a shell in a window. But that is not really all of the point: Windows can offer a whole new 'operating system' to perform tasks better than an equivalent DOS one. If there were a shell that was a WIndows app, and other programs compiled to run under windows, BUT just not open any windows! They would just use the shell as a tty This would give a lot of programs the benefit of memory management, + the simplicity of command line interfaces. DOS has it's roots in command.com and many people are familiar enough with it to be comfortable with it. The file manager is kinda cute, but it is limited: you can't even mark groups of files for moving/deletion, and if you delete a single file, the window comes back with the cursor back up at the top of the window, nowhere near where you changed the file! Even if the file manager was spruced up a bit, I still like shells better for SOME, but not all tasks. The X WIndows approach is good: you can have windows, but you can still have your shells around. File manager is like X Tree or Norton Commander or PCTools. I don't like them. I think there are a lot of 'power users' and even others who can operate much better with a shell. Even OS/2 has its own shell for equivalent dos commands like sort and find etc. Some programs do not benefit from windows. Good utilies like PKZip would be better off running in protected mode and having a few system routines linked in. A quick recompile and link would be all that's necessary for many programs to have better memory, and run better with other windwos programs. BAsically I like WIndows. It runs well in standard mode. The applications that come with it are quite good. The terminal is very simple, but because it multitasks, and cooperates with other programs, the functionality of the program is greater than if it were by itself. This is just one example of the kind of 'small is better' that Gates is rambling on about. I still maintain that alot of utilies are better from command line. A good feature that would be useful for windowless windows apps (!!) would be as filters that could be installed on programs, or could work with the clipbaord somehow: Suppose some text needs to be sorted in Write or Notepad. You write a filter that would take arguments froms a command line, (to be specified by a generic dialog box, or the windows app) It would then run as a pipeline, receiving input from whatever was selected, and then it would go back into the original program, either inserting or overwriting the original input. Now instead of this being a thousand line program, this would be a simple, utility that would not need the entire SDK to write. A C compiler, a windows linker, and some basic libraries that any program would need. If anyone is familiar with Sun's Suntools Window system, this is just what a number of programs did. This was not followed up on though by Sun or others. I also think that these Suntool programs had some of their pull-down menus defined at run-time, so filters could be defined and changed by the user. It seems to me that this is more in tune with an object-oriented philosophy of programming that everyone is ga-ga about these days. I would appreciate feedback on these ideas. Maybe shells aren't for everyone, but I think that it would be very convenient to all users to be able to install their own utilities. Let the application take care of the inter- face and let filters operate on the data represented by the application. John Paul Morrison
bwb@sei.cmu.edu (Bruce Benson) (07/02/90)
In article <1296@fs1.ee.ubc.ca> jmorriso@fs0.ee.ubc.ca (John Paul Morrison) writes: >enough with it to be comfortable with it. The file manager is kinda cute, >but it is limited: you can't even mark groups of files for moving/deletion, Hold down the control key when clicking on the files. You can mark groups for moving/copying/deleting. * Bruce Benson + Internet - bwb@sei.cmu.edu + + * Software Engineering Institute + Compuserv - 76226,3407 + >--|> * Carnegie Mellon University + Voice - 412 268 8496 + + * Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890 + + US Air Force
mms00786@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (07/03/90)
Or better yet, read the manual? Milan .