IP menu

[Seattle Public Theater]

Hi,
Actually, before you head on into this, why not ask Steve to do a little
survey of users.  For instance, there are only a few commands I use, cd,
pwd, dir, e, show, and copy or move.  I don't use file transfer from here,
rarely use lynx from here and usually don't trust it anyway, to wit, why
re-do a whole menu of unused commands.  Why not write up how to use the
few we need to put up pages, then have the IP menu do what the
instructions say, as opposed to not doing what people say is supposed to
happen.

The idea is, simplify.  
Barb

On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Rod Clark wrote:

> 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
> 
> 

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