Today, our own Jaka “lynx” Kranjc sent out a revolutionary e-mail. This one could change the course of Source Mage GNU/Linux forever.

“Fresh users keep confusing sorcery commands up and some of the experienced users occasionally complain about that too. So me and my friend S. A. (a HCI student) have made an usability study on how to improve the situation. We realised that the simplest thing to do would be to shorten the command names, so they consume less biomemory, save you from RSI and give you more time for other unimportant stuff.

Implementation notes
The proposed fix is to implement wrapper scripts (since aliases don’t work everywhere) with the mentioned user-friendly names. The scripts would be put into /sbin, so they’d work even if you had /usr mounted on an unreachable network share or otherwise unavailable. When your system is in dire need of assistance, it is really annoying if things you are used to working with don’t work anymore (a double annoyance).

So here is the sorted initial list of the shortcuts and what they woud run:
cc - cast –queue (who can spell queue anyway?)
cp - cleanse –prune
dd - dispel –downgrade
gs - gaze search
gv - gaze version
sg - sorcery upgrade
sh - sorcery hold
sq - sorcery -q
su - scribe update

As you can see, the list contains only the most frequently used (sub)commands, so feel free to suggest more. I also do realise that ’su’ could be thought of as ’sorcery update’, but since the latter is used less often, scribe has precedence. Maybe ’sup’ or ’soup’ would do?

The code is already in my repository, I’m just waiting for your comments, mages, so I can finalize it to perfection.”

Unfortunately, this met with some criticism. ;)
But possibly some new ideas?

flux_control says:

“In my opinion these are a very bad idea. They will confuse users more (because the meaning behind them will be hidden), and worse, they will confuse the user’s system (try doing a “cp X Y” when cleanse is renamed..or compile something with cast –queue? :-P). In my opinion it’s better to keep the sorcery/cleanse/etc., but clean up the name space for consistency. As an example, dispel -d doesn’t dispel (well, OK, it does, but it also casts, which is the important part). This should be moved to cast -d in my opinion. Also, having all the different cast/gaze/cleanse/scribe commands accessible via sorcery (like sorcery cast $SPELL) would help, because then users really only need to remember one command: sorcery. If they forget what to do with it, RTFM :) If someone wants the short commands, then they can make their own aliases or wrapper scripts.”

Ladislav Hagara says:

“I also do not like this idea. It is very confusing. Moreover most of your shortcuts are regular names of Unix commands.

For new users I would created links started with smgl- (smgl-cast; smgl-dispel; smgl-scribe; …) so if user does not know the right command he/she just writes smgl- and presses TAB and can see all sorcery commands.

Users can use bash-completion.”

Sandalle says:

“That may not be a bad feature to have added: symlinks of smgl- to .”

Swoolley says:

“man sorcery
see also section”

Sandalle says:

“Yeah, just thinking of those who like TAB completion or are new, have RTFM’d, but can’t remember the exact command.”

Jaka “lynx” Kranjc says:

“Users can use bash-completion.
This can go in with the boring namespace. So for every command there’d be a sm- or smgl-$command and a smgl-$(boring $command) (like smgl-uninstall). Not sure if this should be part of sorcery though, as it is trivial to implement in a spell and less trivial in sorcery.

The shortcuts can be done the same way and then the spell added to basesystem.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 10:20 PM and is filed under Quick Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.