[Alpine-info] Re: Strange behaviour in deleting from Gmail

[robert delius royar]

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 (07:15 +0100 UTC) Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik wrote:


> :2009-12-16T14:51:Mark Crispin:

>

>> Two decades ago, I was dragged (screaming and kicking!) into UNIX from an

>> environment, now long extinct, in which people actually cared about

>> user-friendly command line interfaces.  Sadly, most people think that

>> environment was "just like the Windows CLI", which is somewhat like saying "a

>> Trabi is just like a BMW".

>

> Hmmm I'm not really opposed to the current GNU/Linux CLI. I like it a

> lot and use it a lot. I do use zsh as my shell though so I guess I avoid

> a lot of pain. Not only it completes commands it also completes their

> parameters.

>

> I've been in the GNU/Linux world for hmm... 11 or so years now. Before

> that only a year or two on dos/win3.11|win95. But I've always liked

> using the command line.

>

> I'll need to lookup that user-friendly command line interface as well.

> But have you tried using fish(friendly interactive shell)? From what

> I've heard it's supposed to be very user friendly.

>

> Regards

>

> P.S. wrt to keybindings would love a way to define my own in alpine as

> well... should probably file a feature request for that.


My favorite CLI was DCL on VMS systems (ca. 1983).  It had so many 
features for low-level record manipulation and as I recall was 
relatively easy to parse quite a bit of information about date/time, 
data, and processes.  There was also a useful interface to ACLs which 
at that time were not so common.  A teacher with a little knowledge 
and provided disk space could create student accounts that were linked 
together (as in a class) and that could share space.  I recall when 
Emacs for VMS became available being able to have students collaborate 
on files in class and letting the DCL scripts and underlying file 
sharing settings handle the complexity.

At the time, the nearest I could get on other systems was to write the 
code in C.  I think DCL was better featured than is perl and easier to 
remember.  Being an oldish codger, and not a trained programmer, I stay 
with perl and bash most of the time these days.

-- 
Dr. Robert Delius Royar                   Associate Professor of English
Morehead State University                             Morehead, Kentucky