>>30361A more general reply follows, but hitting a few points quickly: I think folding tree menus are fine, as are ordinary "display the contents of this folder, its file path, and - if entered from another directory - a back button, plus a folding tree on the side" type file menus. both show you the menu in a context while - thanks to the file tree and back button - doing nothing to hamper understanding of the overall structure. The windows right-click menu, in different order, contains every menu option you list and more, provided you treat "open with…" as a stand-in for "feed to another program". Nethack doesn't
have to output any feedback (you could just keep dying randomly with no explanation!), it does so because doing so is good design. You raise arabic numerals - but why use base ten as our default? if we counted using binary, you could finger count up to 1023…
Success being assumed is terrible UI design. It costs almost nothing to output "x deleted" - and in the cases where it does cost something (such as in a script that deletes a lot), it costs almost nothing to add a flag telling it to shut up. i assume, to you, this appears terribly redundant (why tell the user the computer's done doing what they asked?) and perhaps even in violation of the unix philosophy (rule 2!!!) - but there's value in redundancies. planes have two pilots for a reason. (a graphical interface doesn't need to pop up "file deleted", you can see it disappear in response to your actions without having to type "ls" and look for it)
i'm not assuming bad faith here, but i'm not sure i can productively convince you of my point. (which, going way back, is really about treating the user with contempt for using the computer "wrong", rather than UI design itself.) there's just too wide a gulf in assumptions about the default - it's like trying to convince a native japanese speaker that most people find it easier to work out the meaning of a sentence based on word-order rather than by marking everything with particles. (although i think this is only true thanks to English and Chinese tilting the statistics, whereas a preference for the convention of graphical interfaces is - i suspect - closer to "human nature". I mean, sticking with games, there's a reason there are more graphical games than non-graphical games! and, for all the terminal use involved, linux
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