Michael Jennings wrote: > On Monday, 27 August 2007, at 07:45:08 (+0900), > Carsten Haitzler wrote: > >> yes - and the bad bit is - this conflicts with code for the config >> gui. the fact is that almost every app on the planet provides a GUI >> (built in) to configure itself - preferences dialogs for firefox, >> settings dialogs for gimp. almost NONE provide "remote >> control". most of the time people don't care - and don't need it.
I'm amazed to hear this attitude on the enlightenment mailing list, let alone from Carsten! I've always been an enlightenment fan primarily because of its incredible flexibility and customizability, not because of its flashy eye candy (that's nice too, but I'd rather ditch that than the flexibility). Of all the window managers out there, I always thought that enlightenment did the best job of combining a beautiful interface with the Unix tradition of plain-text configuration files and scriptability. Enlightenment was always more than just eye-candy: it was the wm of choice for serious hackers who also appreciated a beautiful desktop. It's impossible to predict every weird and wonderful thing users might want to do with E, and I guarantee you won't want to add all of them as extra configuration options! (Many of them will be requested by just one person, and useful only to them. Assuming they would even bother requesting them. Most likely they'd realise there's no hope of getting what they want included, and give up.) By using plain-text config files (or at least allowing binary config files to be manipulated by command-line tools) and opening up E IPC via a command-line tool, E makes it possible to do amazing things using nothing but simple shell scripts. Things that in another window manager couldn't be done without hacking the source code. For example, when I was using E16, I had a whole collection of scripts that automatically opened and closed pagers when I changed virtual desktop, that unshaded my IM client when a message arrived, that let me manipulate enlightenment from within Emacs etc. etc., all done using bash and eesh (the enlightenment_remote equivalent for those who never knew it - I would give E17 examples, but I'm stuck using Windows at the moment so haven't had a chance to play with E17 as much). > This is, of course, not true. Most systems, including firefox > (prefs.js) and GIMP (gimprc, et al.), use text-based configurations > which do not require specialized "remote control" tools beyond a > simple text editor. But even they provide mechanisms for controlling > program behavior from afar, from JavaScript and Script-Fu to special > command line parameters. Exactly. The great thing about Unix is that it doesn't insult your intelligence by assuming it knows what you want better than you do, but instead makes it easy to combine tools in novel ways to do things that the developers would never have dreamed of. I'd be very sad to see enlightenment turn its back on this philosophy. > An automated way of manipulating program configuration is both wanted > and needed. > > The current implementation of E IPC is pretty ugly, yes. That doesn't > mean IPC is bad. It means the IPC code was not designed properly. Maybe I'm hallucinating, but I thought that a while back there was some discussion on enlightenment-user about how some new code (gadcon?) would make it much easier to add new actions to enlightenment_remote at the same time as adding the corresponding GUI elements. Was I dreaming? This sounded great to me at the time, because it seemed to suggest that pretty much *everything* would automatically be made scriptable via enlightenment_remote, without much extra coding effort. Toby ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ enlightenment-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-users
