----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Massimiliano Mirra" <list / NOSPAMchromatic-harp.com.web-hosting.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk / ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2002 11:36 AM
Subject: Re: [OT] Re: GUI's and the Rouge, Part III (yes, finally) 1/2

I've been out of town, so I just saw this...
comments below!

> I'll admit my bias toward ncurses and text interfaces, and it's funny
> this should come up while speaking of spreadsheets.
> 
> While I wouldn't try to convince anybody to agree, and even understand
> that the idea can sound funny to many (whence the smiley), I've
> stubbornly refused to use a spreadsheet until I've found a good one
> that runs in console (teapot), and then designed my own spreadsheet to
> run from the command line as well (ecalc).
> 
> To me, when you don't *need* graphics (e.g. a vectorial drawing or an
> image processing application), the whole matter shifts to feedback
> only.  I don't care about the looks of a Gtk button versus a ncurses
> `button', but I do very much care that it will take me a tenth of the
> time to hit a key to select it on a terminal than to move the mouse
> and click in a GUI, and that it will take the program a tenth of the
> time to get back to me with the updated view.
> 
> It's the computer's task to be fast.  When you're faster than it and
> have to wait for something as simple as *showing* a piece of data, my
> opinion is that something wrong is going on. :-)
> 
> Nobody take this as criticism please.  It's just dinosaur talk, I'm a
> dinosaur and know it well. :-)

I'm a dinosaur, too, and I totally agree with you.
Ive experienced many hours of frustration in the
past wishing that I had interface choices for certain
apps.

I don't run an X server, nor do I really want to. And I
use character-based telnet a lot. And I wish that I had
curses-like interfaces for things so that I could run
them over a telnet connection.

I've been experimenting with the "pluggable" UI concept.
Since I don't understand MVC that much, I'm probably
reinventing the wheel (or rediscovering fire). But it's 
an interesting concept to me.

Anyone who wants to discuss it, speak up.

Cheers,
Hal