On Monday 29 April 2002 22:23, Sean Pecor wrote:
> On Monday 29 April 2002 19:23, Dave Leigh wrote:

> More and more I think that the whole Unix Philosophy (TM) of creating
> simple extensions via piped applications just can't be applied to a desktop
> environment's application interface. There simply isn't a realistic
> translation. From a programmer's perspective, console tools can interact
> (via piping) without being developed with the same API. Furthermore, they
...

I don't agree. Examples abound. One example is my signature line. In kmail 
your signature can be a program. Mine happens to be a bash shell script I 
called "varisig" which combines the .signature file with the output of 
fortune. Other X apps provide additional functionality through pipes to do 
such things as spell-checking. My Klipper talks to an existing Opera process 
through Opera's -remote switch to pull up tell Opera I want to open another 
page, not another instance of Opera. The challenge for the developers is to 
provide a robust scripting interface. The UI challenge is the presentation of 
that interface.

-- 
Dave Leigh, Consulting Systems Analyst
Cratchit.org
  http://www.cratchit.org
  864-427-7008 (direct)
  AIM or Yahoo!: leighdf
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"Every morning, I get up and look through the 'Forbes' list of the
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