IP menu

[Joe Mabel]

I don't care.  I don't use it. All I was trying to do was to point out that 
if the objection is that Unix commands are too obscure (e.g. "cp" for 
copy), it's easy to add mnemonic ones.

-----Original Message-----
From:	Rod Clark [SMTP:bb615 at scn.org]
Sent:	Tuesday, June 01, 1999 11:17 AM
To:	Seattle Public Theater
Cc:	scn at scn.org; webmasters at scn.org
Subject:	Re: IP menu

Barb wrote:
> I personally don't want to do anything that is blank screen
> programming i.e. there's not menu right there.

Joe and Barb,

   OK. Then how about this?

- The menu screen would always be there, to provide a quick
reference list of the most often needed commands.

- Each command listed on the menu would have a friendly help file
that you could view, that would be easier to understand than the Unix
"man" file for the command. You could view the help screen for a
command at any time by typing, for example:

        help cp

When you press Enter after reading the help file, the main main
would re-display and wait for the next command.

- The menu program would let you execute complete commands
directly. It wouldn't force you to type each command with no
arguments, and and then wait for a prompt and then type the
first argument and then wait for another prompt and then type
the second argument. So you could type, for example:

        cp file1 file2

- Unlike now, the menu system would let you execute any valid
Unix command. For help with any commands not included in the
list of menu commands with friendly help files, you'd have to
use the unfriendly Unix "man" utility.

   Does this sound like a reasonable approach? We'd have to
rewrite the menu program quite a lot to do this (it's written in
C), and write up a fairly large number of nice help files. It
would be worth checking first to see whether something like this
exists already in the Unix world.

   Keep in mind that this isn't ever going to get done unless
either the Hardware/Software committee or the Executive
Committee (aka Services - meets this Thursday at 7 at the
Broadview Library) puts it on their agenda and gets some
volunteers to work on it.

Rod Clark

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *  From the Listowner  * * * * * * * * * * * *
.	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
majordomo at scn.org		In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe webmasters
Messages posted on this list are available on the Web at:
http://www.scn.org/volunteers/webmasters/webmasters-l/

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *  From the Listowner  * * * * * * * * * * * *
.	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
majordomo at scn.org		In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe scn
==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ====
* * * * * * *     http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/     * * * * * * *