Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!clyde!cuae2!ihnp4!houxm!vax135!cjp From: cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: my previous "Re: statement" Message-ID: <1696@vax135.UUCP> Date: Mon, 15-Dec-86 23:17:28 EST Article-I.D.: vax135.1696 Posted: Mon Dec 15 23:17:28 1986 Date-Received: Wed, 17-Dec-86 07:06:43 EST References: <1108@spice.cs.cmu.edu> Reply-To: cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier) Distribution: net Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ Lines: 50 Summary: Big file of icons, yes! Globbing, yes! I agree about Workbench being too slow and I like your (and Matt's) ideas for improving icon behavior. Let me suggest a tweak for Worchbench arguments: use Left-amiga-click as Open-with-arguments. This can be an alternative to having to go to the Workbench menu, i.e. support both methods. The "big file of icons" seems like a big win to me if one assumes that it is cached. Then closing and opening drawers that have once been opened becomes instantaneous. (Or nearly; you may have to check time of last dir modification.) Amiga needs to support more caching-type ideas. Memory is cheap and getting cheaper. I've seen Workbench windows where the whole drawer was in ram:, and those things are FAST (if you can afford that much ram). But if it's just the icons in ram, you don't use much memory and still get great response on opening the drawers. In fact, how's this tweak: to save on memory used for the icon cache, you can have a workbench menu command where you click on one of the disk icons to delete it, AND its icon map. Otherwise, all disks you've used remain onscreen and their icons remain in-core. Let's not forget, too, that if ALL files are represented in the icons file, then one could use the icons file as a complete directory listing. No more need for all this grinding just to put up a file requester! Use the current directory scheme only for what it is optimized for: single file access by (unglobbed) filename. ARE YOU LISTENING, COMMODORE-AMIGA ?????!!!!! If so, do you like it? While I'm at it, let me add my vote in favor of uniform filename expansion at the CLI level. The comments on other kinds of expansion are well taken, but I say that filenames are far and away the most common form of globbing. Let other realms of expansion use escapes or quotes. That amount of "inconsistency" is compensated by the security of knowing that filename expansion WILL be done. By the way, this should be tweaked in a way that UNIX screws up: for output-redirection, i.e. cmd >foo#?. ALLOW globbing IF the expansion results in ONE file name (error otherwise). And does anyone besides me miss APPEND redirection (UNIX >>)? I thought so. I'm not saying "recreate UNIX", just "fix up AmigaDOS". And then get the AmigaDOS commands to expect multiple args. Heaven forbid you should ever have a whole bunch of files in the wrong dir. Ever try "rename files#? dir" like one can do on UNIX with mv? It's not bloody supported, nor is a loop such as "for i in files#? rename $i dir". You have to type out every one. Unfriendly to the max! Actually, a real "mv" command should support taking a batch of files *off* one disk and moving them to another (deleting them from the first disk). Charles Poirier (USENET)!vax135!cjp