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From: hmm@laura.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc
Subject: Re: Icons, pipes, etc.
Message-ID: <66@laura.irb.informatik>
Date: Thu, 9-Jul-87 11:39:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: laura.66
Posted: Thu Jul  9 11:39:36 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 02:06:32 EDT
References: <8705190042.AA14664@cogsci.berkeley.edu> <9954@decwrl.DEC.COM> <610@gec-mi-at.co.uk> <367@sugar.UUCP>
Sender: hmm@laura.irb.informatik
Organization: University of Dortmund, W-Germany
Lines: 38

In article <367@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter DaSilva) writes:
>For building pipelines, a better way would be:
>
>Drag ls into the work window.
>Drag pr into the work window.
>Drag the files into the work window.
>
>Click a, ls; b, ls; ls, pr; pr, whatever.
>
>This connects a to ls, b to ls, ls to pr, and pr to whatever.
>
>Then you hit the doit icon or select doit from the menu. (Oh why does everyone
>have to use pull down menus when popups are so much more convenient?)

Why do we have to use icons for everything ?  I really see no
reason to move my mouse around, collecting icons & selecting menus,
when I can do the same thing with just a few keystrokes in a
command line interpreter.  Of course window systems have their
merits, but I think we should not try to translate our good old
unix habits into the mouse&icon language.  There are some things
that can be easily done with an icon-oriented system, like
moving files, executing application programs and such stuff.
Unix pipes are not among those.  Of course, you can use programs
and 'graphical pipes' to build up complex blocks, but the net effect
is that you've got to do MORE things to get something done, instead
of less.
A different thing, of course, are the visual pipes or filters
that someone suggested a while ago (sorry, can't find the article).
If you can take a 'grep' tool like a magnifying glass, move it over
some text, and see only the grepped text, you've got something
useful.  But none of the windowing systems that I've seen work this
way.  They all are just some kind of graphical shell with icons for
filenames, mouse moving for the mv, cp and rm commands, and mouse
clicking for the starting of programs.  These are all things I can
do just as good in a command line interface, thanks.

	Hans-Martin Mosner (hmm@unido.uucp)
	University of Dortmund
D