Re: Craig's "Rainikkusu" site

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Andrew" == Andrew S Howell <andy@example.com> writes:

>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen J Turnbull <turnbull@example.com> writes:
>>>>> "Shige" == Shige Abe <sabe@example.com> writes:
    Shige> We have DnD for our Wharf (Dock), I heard that you can drag
    Shige> filenames into the icon, and the application corresponding
    Shige> to the icon will fire up using data from the file.

    Stephen> Yes, I can see how you'd do that; you give the file
    Stephen> manager (or the window manager) the ability to interpret
    Stephen> calls like "exec mule %s", where %s gets the filename
    Stephen> substituted in.  However, I don't want to fire up a new
    Stephen> mule every time I edit a new file.

    Andrew> You don't have to fire up a new copy every time. You can
    Andrew> use the EDITOR environment variable to send a document to
    Andrew> an resident copy of emacs ( mule ):

I had forgotten about `emacsclient'.  For good reason: it doesn't do
what I want it to do; it's extremely inflexible.  I guess if you
hacked it to accept a geometry specification it would do; mostly I got 
really frustrated with emacsclient's limited understanding of what the 
appropriate window/frame to use is.  In particular, it always uses the 
same one.  That's fine for "temporary" buffers such as a mail
response, not so good for things composed of multiple files.  Maybe
even just a "new window/frame" switch would be enough.

It also doesn't work if there's no mule running with the appropriate
privileges, which is typically the case when I do administration as
root.

So I gave up on it.

The point is not that these nit-picky details rule out d-n-d with
emacs/mule; you're right, it wouldn't take much to make emacsclient
moderately useful, and it eliminates the overhead of starting a new
process.  I probably would never use that feature, because I basically
live in mule (I'm so text-oriented that I often switch from Mule to
the last-used xterm with C-Z!), but somebody who used a different mail
handler from RMail or graphics editors or whatever would find that
feature useful.

The point of talking about these nit-picky details is that most Unix
utilities and applications do have a plethora of option, and many of
us do use them (ie, not just customizing with "export LESS=irs" in 
.bashrc and forgetting about it, but actually using "-ilnv" in various
combinations with *grep, and "-altR" with ls, and so on---it's the
variety that's the problem).  There was an interesting (although
poorly executed in my opinion) article in Communications of the ACM a
few months ago on the "Anti-Mac user interface" which touched on some
of these issues.  In the end, d-n-d is most useful with one-function
utilities with a very simple interface, like the gomi-bako, or
integrated applications.

I can imagine a GUI-based pipeline builder, where you would drag the 'cat'
icon onto the 'sort' icon, then drag the resulting combination icon
(which would pop up on the desktop) onto the 'uniq' icon; right-
clicking on any of the icons would pop up a options dialog; finally,
you drag the file's icon onto the assemblage, and a window pops up
with the output of "cat <file> | sort | uniq" in it.  Might not be
useful for old hands, but I can imagine using that when I need an
arcane grep option, because it could be set from the dialog, rather
than reading a man page.  If there was a good interface to save such a 
"visual macro" to a shell alias, function, or script, I would probably 
write more of those, and write better ones, because of the implicit
help in the dialog boxes.

That I would consider switching to AfterStep to get.

Steve

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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