Re: Is Quanta for me?

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Re: Is Quanta for me?
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 10/Mar/2004, @15:01

> Seems to be that it depends upon your needs. There are definite advantages to Quanta. But it may take awhile (if ever) for some old commandline people to make the switch.

Wow, CLI? Guess what? There is an old saying, "The pen is mightier than the sword" but an old samauri saying paraphrased "pen and sword in accord". In the windows world GUI is king and every operation is a click away. As you no doubt know this is a recipe to drive you insane many times where repetitive tasks demand the "sword" of the CLI to cut quickly through those operations. This doesn't mean that the GUI is in any way bad. It means that GUI and CLI both have strengths and weaknesses. The ideal application "thinks" and acts like a hybrid, getting out of the way and offering up the CLI for the tasks that it makes sense for and pulling the strengths of the GUI where it makes sense. The key is exposing strengths and augmenting weaknesses accordingly.

Quanta offers the user programmable user actions that can execute scripts using any language that runs in the shell. These can operate on selected text, editor content or no input and can output to replace the editor content, selected text or place it at the cursor position... even no output or make a new file. Add to this the fact that we're making sure everything inside is exposed via DCOP and you can script using your current file or project directory... we even have Kommander to build dialogs that add scripting. You could quite literraly open Quanta on one desktop, go to another and begin composing documents and performing various tasks in Quanta from konsole. ;-)

Quanta is not at all about being a superior application because the GUI is king. It is about being a GUI application that is superior because it pays much more than a passing homage to CLI and offers the developer an easy integration of the best of these two technologies.

Why would anyone seriously choose to not be able to choose between them where their strengths serve their needs? ;-)

Related Links

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