things humans are bad at: memorising specific sequences of words
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@bri7
How long is that manpage!?@bri7
Oh, and it doesn't show up for "man -k completion" which is yet another "I have to type what for the documentation?" -
“In Bash's manpage it's written in the §Readline - Completing.”
you have got to be joking.
you do not follow me and be that oblivious about how stupid that sentence sounds
@bri7@social.treehouse.systems It was written somewhere else.
Not somewhere particularly user-friendly (I even remarked on that), but it was.
It noteworthy because there are some things that truly aren't documented at all in various other programs (guess you're fucked if you don't have the Internet then?).
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@bri7@social.treehouse.systems It was written somewhere else.
Not somewhere particularly user-friendly (I even remarked on that), but it was.
It noteworthy because there are some things that truly aren't documented at all in various other programs (guess you're fucked if you don't have the Internet then?).
@lispi314 i beseech you review my list of UI principles to find out why that doesn’t count as being written somewhere
https://notes.yip.pe/Principles%20of%20UI,%20A%20Thread.html
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@lispi314 i hope you’re talking about some emacs that isn’t the text editor that opens with nothing but a blank screen and some cryptic text along the top and bottom, that expects you to memorise 5000 keyboard shortcuts. that would be a silly thing to say, cos at least you can learn a small number of commands on linux that at least lists the available commands and allow you to type them by name
@bri7@social.treehouse.systems I never had that
Emacs, it sounds a lot likezileormg.The one I have has the third link on the opening page be "tutorial".
The tutorial also talks about
apropos,execute-extended-command(M-x) andcompletionwhich remove most of the need to memorize.Through those, with configuration, one can either lookup something by partly-remembered name or remembered movements (keybinds).
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@lispi314 i beseech you review my list of UI principles to find out why that doesn’t count as being written somewhere
https://notes.yip.pe/Principles%20of%20UI,%20A%20Thread.html
1. need to know the man command in advance
2. need to know the feature exists already (defeating the point)
3. need to know the NAME of the feature
4. need to know what bash is
5. need to know what readline isyou might as well say it was written on the dark side of the moon, at the end of a rainbow, at the bottom of a leprechauns’s pot of gold
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@bri7@social.treehouse.systems I never had that
Emacs, it sounds a lot likezileormg.The one I have has the third link on the opening page be "tutorial".
The tutorial also talks about
apropos,execute-extended-command(M-x) andcompletionwhich remove most of the need to memorize.Through those, with configuration, one can either lookup something by partly-remembered name or remembered movements (keybinds).
@lispi314 right so… your emacs is worse than linux, and *is* the one i remember that is worse than linux
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@lispi314 right so… your emacs is worse than linux, and *is* the one i remember that is worse than linux
@lispi314 RTFM is not a serious response to the issue that humans are still not good at memorising specific sequences of words or command key sequences; it displays a kind of illiteracy that makes me wonder
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@lispi314 right so… your emacs is worse than linux, and *is* the one i remember that is worse than linux
@bri7 Emacs at least has the decency of mentioning it has a manual and having it builtin. -
@bri7 Emacs at least has the decency of mentioning it has a manual and having it builtin.
@lispi314 that would be a plus except that most people expect to be able to figure out software well enough and then look in the manual when they run into trouble. by that time, emacs tutorial link is permanently gone
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@lispi314 RTFM is not a serious response to the issue that humans are still not good at memorising specific sequences of words or command key sequences; it displays a kind of illiteracy that makes me wonder
@bri7 I suspect we are running into neurotype differences.
Remembering exact movements that I always do exactly the same to the point that I do not have to think about it and can practically ritualize them comes to me naturally.
I would actually struggle entering my passphrases if I lost a limb, because I simply do not think about the passphrase most of the time. -
@bri7 I suspect we are running into neurotype differences.
Remembering exact movements that I always do exactly the same to the point that I do not have to think about it and can practically ritualize them comes to me naturally.
I would actually struggle entering my passphrases if I lost a limb, because I simply do not think about the passphrase most of the time.@lispi314 memorising exact movements is not contradictory to spatial interfaces
but blind interfaces that totally prevent spatial memory from forming, and require lexical memory to function at all, are contradictory to spatial skills
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@lispi314 memorising exact movements is not contradictory to spatial interfaces
but blind interfaces that totally prevent spatial memory from forming, and require lexical memory to function at all, are contradictory to spatial skills
@lispi314 this is not an issue of neurotype either. better designed UIs help everyone- things like linux and emacs are an elitist club of privileged people who have the time to care deeply about computers
which would be fine if there were not an army of people demanding *everyone* switch to linux and/or emacs while insisting the obvious problems don’t exist, and they’re just too stupid to understand it. it’s a kind of gaslighting
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@madengineering @bri7 > Only nerd nostalgia keeps it that way.
Some things are required to be crappy by POSIX.
Shells that do structured pipes are incompatible.@lispi314 @madengineering @bri7 Nothing should stop one from having more than one shell on a computer, and not all shells have to be POSIX compatible.
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some nerd somewhere i am sure: “uhh you can hit the tab key to autocomplete the directory”
me: oh wow it would be super neat if that was written anywhere other than a shitty internet comment about how stupid i am for not knowing that
repeat for every single linux feature
here’s a wild thought: put documentation visibly next to the feature it relates to instead of in the town planning office, in a locked filing cabinate in the basement next to the sign that says “watch out for leopard”
and i mean individual features, individual documentation. Not a one time dismissable link to a 500 page tutorial written with a tone that is contemptuous to its users.
(RMS is a huge offender here, his tutorials are universally awful)
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@lispi314 @madengineering @bri7 Nothing should stop one from having more than one shell on a computer, and not all shells have to be POSIX compatible.
@fogti @madengineering @bri7 Indeed, and a few have decided to do just that.
Lack of structured pipes & interchange is one of my problems with the UNIX/POSIX ecosystem. -
here’s a wild thought: put documentation visibly next to the feature it relates to instead of in the town planning office, in a locked filing cabinate in the basement next to the sign that says “watch out for leopard”
and i mean individual features, individual documentation. Not a one time dismissable link to a 500 page tutorial written with a tone that is contemptuous to its users.
(RMS is a huge offender here, his tutorials are universally awful)
@bri7 this is one thing I will say for SOlaris, the docs for that aren't "here's a manpage", and they're also not "oops! something went wrong!" type shit. they're right there, they tell you the shit you need to know, don't throw source code at you, but neither do they hide bits
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here’s a wild thought: put documentation visibly next to the feature it relates to instead of in the town planning office, in a locked filing cabinate in the basement next to the sign that says “watch out for leopard”
and i mean individual features, individual documentation. Not a one time dismissable link to a 500 page tutorial written with a tone that is contemptuous to its users.
(RMS is a huge offender here, his tutorials are universally awful)
@bri7
I miss the Amiga here.
Put the mouse pointer over anything and press the big, friendly HELP key and get a hypertext manual at the page for that specific part of the UI.Yes, the Amiga had a HELP key.
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here’s a wild thought: put documentation visibly next to the feature it relates to instead of in the town planning office, in a locked filing cabinate in the basement next to the sign that says “watch out for leopard”
and i mean individual features, individual documentation. Not a one time dismissable link to a 500 page tutorial written with a tone that is contemptuous to its users.
(RMS is a huge offender here, his tutorials are universally awful)
FYI
The Design of Everyday Things has a whole chapter explaining in detail exactly how and why emacs is an awful design, and compares it to desk phones in its opacity and the sheer absurd size of its manual compared to its function- text editing, being a phone; which on no sane planet should require a 500 page manual, just to get startedIt’s literally typing and editing text. it’s recieving and making phone calls what are you doiinng?
it uses these two things to explain a specific design issue: the problem of designed objects priming its users (especially women who are already culturally primed in this direction) to believe they’re just too stupid to use the object, rather than the more accurate fact: the designers of this objects were too stupid to understand the people who would be using their thing, and failed at designing something appropriate
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here’s a wild thought: put documentation visibly next to the feature it relates to instead of in the town planning office, in a locked filing cabinate in the basement next to the sign that says “watch out for leopard”
and i mean individual features, individual documentation. Not a one time dismissable link to a 500 page tutorial written with a tone that is contemptuous to its users.
(RMS is a huge offender here, his tutorials are universally awful)
command line system:
you type something
you press enter
computer respondsyes, search engines, chatbots, intrractive fiction, databases and programming language REPLs all count.
you might quibble that something like bash is able to launch programs, modify the file system, etc; but technically, aside from search engines, sort of, so do all the others
mac spotlight. the control+p command palette in sublime text and vs code. Aza Raskin’s Enso.
But i would totally argue that a search engine like google remembering your activity and using it as context for future searches counte as modifying the state of a system.
Because so many people are only used to exactly one command line system, they overfit their mental definition to the exact shape that one takes; which to me seems like a kind of mental amputation; you’ve cut off the part of your brain that would have been able to imagine a better design for a command line interface
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command line system:
you type something
you press enter
computer respondsyes, search engines, chatbots, intrractive fiction, databases and programming language REPLs all count.
you might quibble that something like bash is able to launch programs, modify the file system, etc; but technically, aside from search engines, sort of, so do all the others
mac spotlight. the control+p command palette in sublime text and vs code. Aza Raskin’s Enso.
But i would totally argue that a search engine like google remembering your activity and using it as context for future searches counte as modifying the state of a system.
Because so many people are only used to exactly one command line system, they overfit their mental definition to the exact shape that one takes; which to me seems like a kind of mental amputation; you’ve cut off the part of your brain that would have been able to imagine a better design for a command line interface
@bri7
It's a real problem with the homogenisation of modern computing.What I would give for Smalltalk's Workspaces or a good Lisp style Listener...
Or even a bunch of stuff I had on the Amiga.
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