[Discuss] File Systems vs.Databases Was: Re: SSH options (was Future of X11 (was Trying to connect to internet in Debian))

[slitt at troubleshooters.com (Steve Litt)]

Kent Borg said on Fri, 23 Jan 2026 07:33:11 -0800

>On 1/23/26 7:03 AM, Kent Borg wrote:
>> Google doesn't pay me enough to annoy my wife enough to dig them up  
>
>If Google wants to hire me to do UI design, I'd be interested. But I 
>actually thought the original Macintosh was really good, 

I used one for 15 minutes in 1984, and as I remember it was horrible.
Of course I was used to RT/11, CPM and MSDOS :-)

>and the 
>much-maligned "menu" is wonderful way to present UI options, 

s/wonderful/the only good/

A well designed hierarchical menu is worth its weight in gold. They
even had one on the CLI UI CPM Osbourn computer in the mid 1980's.

You might enjoy reading about UMENU2. I use it tens of times a day. I
don't normally recommend it to folks because menu configuration is
tedious and error prone, but as a concept it's wonderful.

https://troubleshooters.com/projects/umenu2/

If you ever write an *easy to use* 2 way menu configurator (both reads
and writes a menu tree) in Python, Go or Rust, and license it gpl3,
I'll package it with the current UMENU2 and get it well publicized, and
lots of people will use it. I just haven't had the time to do it,
because the natural configurator would be a 2 pane GUI that looks like
a file browser. However, the ideal would actually be a Curses app like
mc, but be careful: By design nCurses *always* triggers a memory error
in Valgrind.

This is 2025 and we have very fast processors and video cards. It might
be preferable to redraw the entire screen every time the user makes any
kind of change. Hell, keeping 24 lines of 80 characters with 16 colors
in an array would be cheap in these days of 512 Megabyte minimums to run
most Linuxes.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com