Re: [dwm] musca wm

From Bash and readline man page (bugs section):
    "It's too big and too slow.

I think this bug is the perfect definition of GNU/FSF style.

Have you seen a piece of software that is small, efficient and easy to
read and in each new version it become clumsy, slow and bloated?

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:11 PM, Preben Randhol <randhol_AT_pvv.org> wrote:
> 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/
>
>
>
Received on Fri May 15 2009 - 21:35:31 UTC