Re: dselect survey
Bernd Eckenfels <lists@lina.inka.de> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 08:30:50PM -0800, Blunt Jackson wrote:
>>Having
>> "enter" exit the
>> selection process (rather than simply selecting the entry) is
>> perennially surprising,
>
> And the need to use upper-Q in conflict resolution to keep the selections
> one has made manually is also pretty confusing.
Er, these are shortcuts. *shrug*
Uppercase is often used, relatively consistently, for things that you
really don't want to do inadvertently.
I learnt the most useful shortcuts, I know them, and I don't find them
particularly confusing. Very few are needed to do basic package
management (I would say, 10 or so). If in doubt, you can always invoke
the online help, which is bound to the question mark, so again, I don't
see a problem (oh, wait, some "industry standard" says it should be F1.
Well, frankly, I don't care.).
For people who are allergic to keyboard shortcuts, I would suggest some
point-and-click frontend; that is simply not dselects's target audience,
AFAICT.
I've always thought that people who say they hate dselect (or, worse,
that dselect is crap) fall into one of the following cases:
(a) allergic to text-mode interfaces
(b) type or click without thinking
(c) haven't used it for more than 5 years (I don't know how dselect was
before slink)
(d) didn't bother to read the "dselect for beginners" tutorial or any
similar introductory document
(e) have had problems with packages that didn't install, upgrade or
configure correctly and wrongly blamed dselect for these problems.
[ Quizz of the day: which cases do you think are the most common? ]
Once you understand the basics, I find dselect to be a very useful and
efficient program.
--
Florent
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