[404] in Athena User Interface
Re: gtest account
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Fri Sep 8 11:29:30 2000
Message-Id: <200009081528.LAA01942@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU, sbjones@MIT.EDU, jlittell@MIT.EDU, kcahill@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2000 11:28:39 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
> (2) not part of AUI.
This was suggested by an Owls member as a "well, as long as you're
looking at these issues, this change will probably reduce user
confusion" sort of thing. I shall fail to attempt to answer the
puzzling question of what is and is not a part of the project, as the
longer I work on it and the more people I talk to, the less I am sure.
> That said, I think that using "\n%c" is really dumb.
Thanks for that vote of confidence for my intelligence. 8(
> First of all it gives the user a two line prompt for no reason.
The reason is that when you get input back that doesn't terminate in a
newline, your prompt floats off in the middle of the screen, and is
hard to find. I find this annoying; I don't know about other people.
I have actually been using a prompt with a leading newline for the
past three years at least, and I've never had a problem with it
(except perhaps with IRIX console logins earlier this week, but I'm
not sure that's the cause).
Nevertheless, I'm perfectly happy to let the users decide what they
like best. (Which is why we're doing testing with it.)
> %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.
%d (full path to your current directory) was discussed, and decided
against for that very reason. But, since our mission is to seek the
One True Prompt, we could give people "%d athena%" and see if they
complain about either of the things that I would.
-B.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
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