[Konsole-devel] Konsole usability enhancements.

[Luis Quintela Garcia]

Hi Robert,
many thanks you for your speedy answer. I believe, that I didn't  
express my idea clearly enough. I propose a feature, which should  
improve the learn-ability of the shell. The "workflow" project you  
mentioned works in order to bring the power of the shell to the users  
through GUIs. On the other hand the "fish" project has been developed  
as an alternative shell, whilst "bash" is a widespread standard.

Surely the average user doesn't need to use a shell on his PC. I  
agree, that the shell is intended for technical work, providing a  
powerfully interface for UNIX. Further I believe that the Konsole  
doesn´t need any great enhancement in this way. UNIX shells offer a  
great technical quality and needless to say it can be argued, that  
only for this reason the shell will continue to play an important role.

But there is the social aspect of the technology. Obviously in a GUI   
dominated world it is hardly surprising that up and coming computer  
experts turn to GUIs. I think that only a few students of computer  
science can use the shell properly. But they are the future experts.  
Let me present an example which I experienced during my studies. A   
professor asked a group of approximately 100 third year students:  
"How  many of you know about the pipes of the UNIX shell?" Only 10  
students had heard of this. The professor then commented that only a  
few years ago this situation would have been unthinkable.

However I believe that a limited number of shell programers could  
significantly hinder the progress of UNIX systems.

I am under no illusions that my feature is the final solution for  
this problem. I'm simply interested in looking for a possible way to  
improve the learn-ability of the shell.

I would be very grateful for any further thought.

Regards,
Luis.


Am 08.08.2006 um 18:57 schrieb Robert Knight:

> Hello Luis,
>
> I read your proposal on the konsole-devel mailing list for making a
> widget in Konsole which helps beginners understand UNIX commands.
>
> I think however there are a couple of projects which are addressing
> the need to bring the power of UNIX tools to newcomers more
> comprehensively:
>
> 1)  There is a Google Summer of Code 2006 project called "Workflow"
> which provides a user interface similiar to Apple's Automator program
> on Mac OS X, designed to bring some of the power of a console to users
> with a simple point-and-click interface.
>
> http://code.google.com/soc/kde/appinfo.html?csaid=BD9ED2FC13E07E4C
>
> Source code can be found here:
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/utils/workflow/
>
>
> 2)  There is an alternative shell to bash called "fish" (for "Friendly
> Interactive Shell")
>
> Fish is quite slow at the moment, but it is definitely much more
> friendly to use than bash:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_interactive_shell
>
> Fish also provides a very good "beginners guide" to the shell which is
> easy to access by typing "help".
>
> I will try out the code when I get a chance.
>
> Regards,
> Robert.