On 02/22/2013 03:47 AM, david wrote: >>>> dwm has both idiosyncrasies and a learning curve, but so too do most >>>> "expert" pieces of software. vim and emacs are the canonical examples, > Being hard to learn doesn't make something an "expert" piece of software - > unless you're talking about a *field* that requires lots of expertise such > as rocket science. Text editing isn't rocket science. A text editor > shouldn't be as hard to learn as rocket science. ;-) What makes something an "expert" piece of software is simply that it's not aimed at the layman. vi, emacs and dwm were meant for software developers and system administrators to use. And a musician who's also one of those things will probably be able to figure out those programs. A musician who isn't should probably use leafpad or something like that. Anything more involved and they're not going to be able to figure out how to turn on syntax highlighting, regular expression search and replace, autocompletion, etc. anyway. Text editing isn't rocket science, but when vi and emacs were originally written, it was computer science. Since then it's just been 30-40 years of iteration to make them more capable without much thought to whether someone accustomed to Windows Notepad could use them. I've used both for about 25 years, and have no use for the (to me ill-advised) menu extensions that don't really help noobs use them while taking up space on my screen that could be used for one or two more lines of code. For those poor laymen who have to edit files from the command line, we have nano now. I still get questions from people who allegedly have degrees in my field about functions that are prominently displayed in its little menu at the bottom of the screen. Instead of reading the screen, they've been trained to look for File/Save. Software meant for the layman but that's difficult to use, on the other hand, is just poorly-written software. (Expert software can be bad too, but usually that doesn't last 30 years.) Rob _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
