[MUD-Dev] Clients

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

Sometime at or around 07:27 AM 1/14/98 +0000, I personally witnessed
Shawn Halpenny jumping up to shout:
>
>There's a learning curve whenever
>you change the interface [...] Sure, it's probably documented=20
>somewhere, but if I fire up that client and discover off the=20
>bat that all my vi knowledge just magically works, I don't even=20
>need to bother reading the dox.

Well... to play devil's advocate for a moment... what about those
of us
like me, who absolutely detest vi, want nothing whatsoever to do with
it, and when given a client that works just like vi are inspired to
make the sign against the evil eye and immediately delete the
software?
I mean, vi is *not* something most people enjoy using or learning.
It's
widely considered a tremendous pain in the ass. So why, for the
sake of
programmers and systems professionals like us, should we perpetuate
this archaic lowest-common-denominator interface from an operating
system that the vast majority of people don't understand? What about
the positively huge number of people out there who would be hopelessly
confused by the vi command syntax, and scratch their heads for hours
over the dual-mode command line? Which mode is it in? Which mode is it
supposed to be in? Is the j key up or down? (I can never remember
that,
I always have to try it and see.) Am I in insert mode or overstrike
mode? Did I make a typo on the command line and put the editor into
some weirdo alternative configuration that does something heinously
wrong to my text? How do I undo it without typing q! and starting
over?
Bluntly, I don't think the majority of MUD players think vi is a
desirable interface for anything. Not even vi.=20

As always: I Could Be Wrong. I can just see hundreds of people mailing
the list and extolling the virtues of vi as the interface of the
future.=20

>But what of the people who _do_ know precisely what they want?=A0 Are
you
>going to force them to throw out their old interface knowledge and
make
>them learn the new one?

If you wanted me to build a client just for you, I would completely
concur with your desires and nod vigorously at every suggestion you
made that was even remotely feasible. If you were asking me to build a
client for your entire department, and you insisted on some interface
decision like this -- then yes, I *would* force you to throw out your
interface knowledge, unless you could show to my satisfaction that the
rest of your department agreed with your idea and had a similar level
of knowledge. If I was building a program for general distribution to
the world at large and you sent me a suggestion like this, I'd laugh
hysterically and delete it.=20

It all depends on context. I don't expect Windows notepad or Microsoft
Word to support regular expression searches, and if they did I'd find
it less than useful. I *do* expect the source code editor in any
programmer's IDE to support them. You have to consider the audience.

>That's what _I_ want.=A0 That's probably not what some newbie
>player to that MUD wants.

Is it what *anyone* could be reasonably expected to want? I mean, it
strikes me as being very specific, esoteric, and unusual. I'm
wondering
when I look at this suggestion exactly what sort of client we're
talking about here. Who's expected to use this client? What context is
it in? I mean, if this is a client intended specifically and
exclusively for the MUD admins and builders -- people who have
traditionally (on many classic MUD architectures) been expected to
spend a lot of time in UNIX shells working in vi or some similar
editor
for extended periods -- then I'd take this suggestion a lot more
seriously than if we're talking about a client for all the MUD's
players.=20

>If I don't have to do a mental context
>switch when I decide to MUD, all the better.

I always thought mental context switches were what MUDs were all about
in the first place.

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