Re: [dwm] musca wm

> I cannot understand GNU software. ls or cat source in GNU is scary,
> glibc is even worse. The old UNIX utilities or Plan9 ones have a
> simplicity which GNU lacks. I don't have anything against the GPL
> license, but I prefer less restrictive licenses. And, of course, I
> don't like rms.
 i don't know what's up with this newfangled popular hate for GNU
software. The GNU userland is a thousand times more comfortable and
usable than old unix, not least because some utils even have >features<
(imagine that), while the old unix tools were simplistic hackjobs.

 Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but
obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as annoyed
with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even Firefox as
anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI userland that
make it comfortable is mad. Would you use dash instead of zsh as an
everyday shell?

 At a risk of being boring, I'll say that the same argument can be made
about text editors: VIM is quite bloated and big, but it's better than
any small text editor; because text editing is one of those typical
tasks that cannot be comfortable without a million features that are in
no way related to each other. Even if someone writes a really small,
elegant, suckless editor core, it will be unusable until:
 - it gets encoding handling right (internal, file, terminal)
 - word wrapping (disabled, enabled, soft, hard...)
 - syntax highlighting and autoindent, for C, Python, Lisp...
 - all possible tab behaviors (soft, hard, half,...)
 - autocompletion, ctags integration
These are just the absolutely necessary basics, and if you implement
these, you already have a multi-ten-thousand line application.
Sucklessness goes through the window.
(Yes, there are people who make do with mcedit, but.. come on.)

 I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's
suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not
all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only
marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper handling of
this would require adding of this "bloat" everyone hates so much.

Best regards,
 Mate
PS. am not trolling :)
Received on Fri May 15 2009 - 18:29:11 UTC