YaST/Events/Workshop Prague 2007/Day 1/Handle graphical and text mode separately

From openSUSE

This page tries to collect the ideas about the present and future of YaST TUI (text user interface).

• Task of our days: "Make YaST more sexy" (Klaus)

Do we really need it? Do users want it? Those are important questions, however not to be answered at this place. Here it is presumed as a goal.

We can have YaST more sexy even if those features are only in GUI, ncurses don't need to be sexy at all, it's just a textual interface. Compare w3m or lynx to Firefox - all of them are needed, all of them are wanted, all of them do what they were meant to do: Show HTML pages, even if some pages sometimes don't fit the window size.

Different UIs have different target groups. Look&feel of one UI can be improved (made more sexy), while the other UIs does not necessarily need to follow (be 1:1 copy) because their users simply do not want it.

• Main theme: If YaST should look "better" (using special GUI effects), it might become more and more difficult to maintain current ncurses UI.

Currently, we get it almost for free (from the perspective of YaST module developers), but with more richer GUI it might become impossible to stick with one transparent UI framework.

We still don't know what are the special GUI effects users want. Would they influence look& feel only? Or would they have effect on functionality as well? Does some survey on this need to be carried out?

On the other hand, ncurses UI users appreciate current simplistic design and they want to keep it functionally equivalent to GUI

• "Are we limiting ourselves with ncurses?" (Klaus)

Yes, definitely. Currently every developer must think of how the UI of any new module would look like in ncurses. However, not every limitation is a bad thing (HuHa) - this part of UI design prevents users from constructing dialogs too crowded.

Users are used to having YaST modules that don't work (or look different) in ncurses, the majority still works and they are happy having at least those ones. They however need some fallback for the cases when GUI does not work

There is a solution for ncurses, just do the same as current textual web browsers, if the dialog doesn't fit, allow user to scroll left-right, up-down. Probably not easy to implement but we wouldn't have those 80x25 problems anymore.

Text-mode UI is our competetive advantage over those distros that don't have any

There are some aspect where having textual interface may be limiting, but there are others where having TUI is a big plus

• Do openSUSE users actually use ncurses YaST?

9 percent YaST survey participants are using mainly ncurses UI of YaST ([1])

• Do enterprise users use ncurses YaST?

It is presumed that they do, but we need some real data. (Stano: "other distros want text UI")

There were several bugreports from SGI and IBM that something in ncurses hadn't worked which means that they were, at least, testing it. On the other hand, I can't remember any GUI-related bugreports (this fact might mean, that there were no GUI-related bugs) :) ;)

In an enteprise environment (serial console, no X libs on a server, Xen,...) ncurses YaST is often the only choice

• What are the reasons of our users to use ncurses YaST?

• speed
• lower memory consumptions (mainly for installation)
• accessibility via network(SSH)/serial line (X-forwarding isn't always a good idea)
• the same features as in GUI
• sometimes it's the way how to reinstall the GUI interface when it is broken (ncurses is used as a safety belt)
• ...

See why people use ncurses Yast and why do they like it

• If we'd drop ncurses, could we satisfy the needs of users with another text UI (less difficult to maintain), just like command line mode (which is already there, although may require some enhancements)?

This is an academic question. We've tried to add a command-line interface to every single module, but honestly, even if we have put a lot of effort into that interface they are not of any use when we compare them to ncurses. The ncurses interface is almost for free but if someone wants to write a commandline interface, he/she has to write it from scratch. We can't afford such overload.

Large part of our users even don't know there is a command line interface (or they never use it, because it is poorly documented)

Currently there is no functional equivalent of ncurses YaST, usable at all times. The substitutes (CLI, web-interface) have certainly their pros and cons, but cannot fully make up for ncurses YaST

See users' point of view on possible dropping text-mode UI and what do they think should be an adequate substitute

Possible conclusions

• We should cater for needs of different types of users. We can make one UI an eye-candy for those users that want it, while keeping the other one simplistic, because its users want it to stay so.
• While improving look&feel, we should keep in mind that users do need and do appreciate functional equivalency of all UIs
• Having ncurses may limit us in certain aspects (no yellow-violet-pinkish eye-candy, no icons in every single table cell, low resolution and mouseless user,...) there are other areas in which it gives us even more freedom instead of restricting us (we're independent of functional X server, certain web-browser, fast network connection, and we still can have well-usable and functionally equivalent UI).