[GRASS-dev] XDRIVER

[Roger Miller]

Moritz,

I initially learned GRASS through the GUI that was current at the time,
which was much more primitive than the GUI you have now.  I quit using
the GUI soon after when I realized that it was faster and just as easy
to use the command line, that using the GUI required as much knowlege as
using the command line and that the command line offered help more
quickly and more easily than the GUI.

Obviously your GUI has grown since that time and the current version is
much more capable and evolved than the one I initially used.  I tried
familiarizing myself with each upgraded version of the GUI but generally
found them difficult to learn.  All of them, including the current form,
seemed to share the same basic design.  As a result, I'm not intimately
familiar with the current GUI.  I also have no reason to become familiar
with it.

I built my GUI gradually over a number of years and developed two basic
concepts for it's design.  I also built it from the point of view of a
capable command-line user.

First is that the GUI should be organized and visually simple, not
confusing to the eye and it should offer only a few choices at any time.
If you're already accustomed to looking at your GUI -- I'm not -- then
you probably won't get confused by it's visual presentation.

To that end, my GUI is also a one-button GUI wherever possible.  I
haven't changed things like the Tk digitizer, so that still uses three
buttons.  I found that restricting myself to using one mouse button made
me think through the process more completely and organize it more
carefully.

Second is that no capability should be added to the GUI unless it can be
made simpler and/or faster than the command line operation.  In the
sequence of development some things were obvious early choices for
inclusion in the GUI.  It is very difficult to build and manipulate
complicated map displays from the command line, so simplifying that
process was the first purpose of the GUI.  The last major addition to
the GUI was mapcalc, which is quite easy to use from a command line, so
I had a hard time inventing a graphical interface that was more
useful.  

There are still capabilities I haven't added and some that I will
probably never add.  I have yet to find a way of setting raster color
rules that is simpler or faster than the command line.  There are many
modules that I don't plan on adding because I have no use for them.
Were I to add some of the more specialized modules they would probably
go into the background somewhere so that I would never see them unless I
asked to see them.


Roger


On Thu, 2011-04-14 at 11:21 +0200, Moritz Lennert wrote:
> On 14/04/11 01:50, Roger Miller wrote:
> > Thanks, Markus.  I appreciate that.
> >
> > It looks like I will have three choices; stay with 6.4/6.5 and use a
> > dead-end system, move to 7.0 and a GUI that I don't want to use,
> 
> Maybe you could tell us why the new GUI is so unacceptable and what type 
> of GUI would suit your needs ? Not in terms of every detail you have 
> tweaked in your own GUI, but more in terms of principles.
> 
> Moritz
>