Re: [wmii] Re: quick thanks... for wmii

On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 06:40:59PM +0100, Uriel wrote:
> The beauty of ed is that its design is so minimalistic and its
> interface so elegant, that it can adapt to a completely new
> environment without the need of any changes.
>
> The beauty of rio terminals is that they transparently provide a
> plethora of new functionality for existing applications without the
> need to modify them or compromise their clean and simple design.
>
> Both this things are direct consequence of the Unix/Plan 9 philosophy
> of "do one thing and do it well" and of an ecosystem of small tools
> that play nicely together, where each new tool augments the
> functionality of the already existing tools instead of having ot hack
> every new piece of functionality into every single tool.
>
> Vi is the total opposites, its interfaces is so ugly and awkward that
> the only way it can adapt to a new environment is with some serious
> reworking. The only way for it to not depend on a terminal model that
> is over thirty years old is for it to internalize the functionality of
> the terminal(cursor addressing etc).

Actually I think your last statement applies much more to the
rio terminal than to a vt. Except the fact, that the rio
terminal allows the cursor being a text selection, it provides
no higher level grid- or cell-adressing like a vt, because it is
1-dimensional and behaves much more like a typewriter/teletype than a
vt in my eyes. The rio terminal fails miserably whenever you run
a 'higher level' vt application which makes use of 2d-addressable
character/text output like vi. Hence it seems to me to depend on
technology which is already over 100 years old.

However, because of its 1-dimensional simplicity, even hello world
programs in 100 years will adapt perfectly to such a terminal.
(In general, any program which adapts perfectly to an
1-dimensional terminal, also adapts perfectly to a n-dimensional
terminal with n > 1).

So the quintessence is, if you write programs which rely on 100
year old technology, it is quite safe that they will run for 200
years. It has to be proven, that vt's will last the next 70
years before we can decide them to be no mayfly.

Regards,

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe >< http://suckless.org/~arg/ >< GPG key: 0D73F361