Re: [dwm] musca wm

On Fri, 15 May 2009 20:29:11 +0200
Mate Nagy <mnagy_AT_port70.net> wrote:

> > 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 :)
>

I couldn't agree with you more!

-- 
Preben Randhol
http://wee-free-lore.blogspot.com/