[403] in Athena User Interface
Re: gtest account
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tibbetts)
Fri Sep 8 10:00:12 2000
Message-Id: <200009081400.KAA19880@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU, sbjones@MIT.EDU, jlittell@MIT.EDU, kcahill@MIT.EDU,
tibbetts@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 08 Sep 2000 09:20:12 EDT."
<200009081320.JAA01446@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2000 10:00:06 -0400
From: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
On 9/8 "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> Reflect changes needed in /usr/athena/lib/init:
> - .cshrc.mine: set prompt="\n%c athena%% "
> (Note: Leading \n may cause problems for console logins under
> IRIX, or there may be a bug in the release; I have to do some
> testing. Change suggested by Owls.)
I think that changing the prompt is (1) not a good idea and (2) not
part of AUI. That said, I think that using "\n%c" is really dumb.
First of all it gives the user a two line prompt for no reason. Back
when I was a new unix user I set myself up a 2 line prompt and it made
lots of things work not quite optimally. Furthermore, I at least had
information in the first line. I want to know what the justification
is for having a blank line before each prompt. If the justification is
(as I believe it is) 'beland thinks it is more aesthetic' then the
"\n" should be dropped.
Second you are using %c to indicate path rather than the more useful
%d. As best I can tell %c simply gives one a false feeling of
security. For example, %c will not tell me whose Public directory is my
current directory[*]. %d does have the problem that if you are deep in
the AFS heirarchy it will display a long path. However, I believe that
this happens insufficiently frequently for most users that it is
acceptable.
If we must change the athena% prompt, we ought to change it to
something reasonable, such as "%d athena%% ".
tibbetts
[*] An example of this problem:
> tibbetts@hikari-no-ken:~> set prompt="\n%c athena%% "
>
> ~ athena% cd Public
>
> ~/Public athena% attach beland yak
> attach: /afs/athena.mit.edu/user/b/e/beland attached to /mit/beland for filesystem beland
> attach: /afs/athena.mit.edu/user/y/a/yak attached to /mit/yak for filesystem yak
>
> Public athena% cd /mit/beland/Public
>
> Public athena% cd /mit/yak/Public
If we had instead used "%d athena%%" for the path:
> tibbetts@hikari-no-ken:~> set prompt="%d athena%% "
> ~ athena% cd Public
> ~/Public athena% attach yak beland
> attach: /afs/athena.mit.edu/user/y/a/yak attached to /mit/yak for filesystem yak
> attach: /afs/athena.mit.edu/user/b/e/beland attached to /mit/beland for filesystem beland
> ~/Public athena% cd /mit/yak/Public
> /mit/yak/Public athena% cd /mit/beland/Public
> /mit/beland/Public athena%
Note that most importantly, in the last 2 lines, exactally what the
user types with 'cd' appears to the right. This will help users
understand what information is being displayed to them.
-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-
