4 ms·

It's literally named "Text Editor". Why is GNOME like this!

monster_group 4y ago
Seriously. You would think smart people who write such software would understand the importance of naming things properly and uniquely. Imagine trying to google to troubleshoot any "Text Editor" issues. You will get a bunch of unrelated stuff.
- TingPing 4y ago
  Its "gnome-text-editor" very simple and SEO friendly.
  - alanbernstein 4y ago
    Where in the ui can you see this secret true name?
    - Joeboy 4y ago
      The best way I know is something like, open a terminal and do find /usr/share/applications | xargs grep "Name=Text Editor" Then look for the `Exec` line in whatever files it finds. This is obviously terrible, and not really "in the UI" like you asked. Maybe there's a better way but it's not obvious to me.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  It’s one of the two hard computer science problems, you know. Cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  Strangely enough, about the only time I ever have to troubleshoot gnome issues is when I do a distro upgrade and have to go fix all the new defaults to something usable. I’m sure fedora will follow suit and I’ll have to do some googling on how to get the new and improved text editor into a functional state sometime soon.
- simion314 4y ago
  AFAIK GNOME has one or few designers that created a vision and developers thave to implement it, so all GNOME apps are named like that(the video player is named Videos etc), this vision imposed a lot of stupidity including removing the System Tray because they the smarted designers ever decided that they know better and all other non GNOME software needs to follow their designed if they want the privilege to work as expected under GNOME.
ByteJockey 4y ago
There's a long tradition of just naming things what they are. ed (editor) vi (visual) and emacs (editor macros) all stem from this. They're shorter, but when they were released (70s for all of them), there was a 6 character limit on a lot of systems for command names. Or do you mean why is there a space in the name? That would be annoying for launching from the terminal, I can see that.
- alanbernstein 4y ago
  There is a much shorter tradition of Ubuntu using dumb names like this, which are descriptive yes, but also too generic. "Vi" is not "just naming the editor what it is", it's a relatively distinct short name that doesn't actually mean anything unless you know the reason for the name (which I did not for years after being introduced to it). At some point recently, Ubuntu stopped using "nautilus" as the name of the file manager, and now it's just called "files". Except, wait, that's some kind of alias, so the process name is still nautilus after you start it. If you don't know the relationship between the GUI name alias, and the literal process name, how are you supposed to figure it out? How are you supposed to search for info or help about "files"? It's too generic.
  - ByteJockey 4y ago
    > "Vi" is not "just naming the editor what it is", it's a relatively distinct short name that doesn't actually mean anything unless you know the reason for the name (which I did not for years after being introduced to it). But "visual" is was vi is. That's its grand innovation. It took a lot of it's (non-motion) commands straight from ed, but let you see the entire page of text as you changed it. ed didn't do this because it needed to be conscious of teletype machines. It's a direct abbreviation of ex's "visual" command (and used to just launch you into ex in visual mode), and everyone using it at the time would have known what it meant. > If you don't know the relationship between the GUI name alias, and the literal process name, how are you supposed to figure it out? Oh boy. If you do not appreciate doing deep lore spelunking to understand things, the unix/linux ecosystems are going to be frustrating for you. Half of our stuff still pretends it's operating on those old character based teletype machines I mentioned earlier. > How are you supposed to search for info or help about "files"? Do you have the same problem with the "fork" call?

Seriously. You would think smart people who write such software would understand the importance of naming things properly and uniquely. Imagine trying to google to troubleshoot any "Text Editor" issues. You will get a bunch of unrelated stuff.

TingPing 4y ago
Its "gnome-text-editor" very simple and SEO friendly.
- alanbernstein 4y ago
  Where in the ui can you see this secret true name?
  - Joeboy 4y ago
    The best way I know is something like, open a terminal and do find /usr/share/applications | xargs grep "Name=Text Editor" Then look for the `Exec` line in whatever files it finds. This is obviously terrible, and not really "in the UI" like you asked. Maybe there's a better way but it's not obvious to me.
tambourine_man 4y ago
It’s one of the two hard computer science problems, you know. Cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors.
UncleEntity 4y ago
Strangely enough, about the only time I ever have to troubleshoot gnome issues is when I do a distro upgrade and have to go fix all the new defaults to something usable. I’m sure fedora will follow suit and I’ll have to do some googling on how to get the new and improved text editor into a functional state sometime soon.
simion314 4y ago
AFAIK GNOME has one or few designers that created a vision and developers thave to implement it, so all GNOME apps are named like that(the video player is named Videos etc), this vision imposed a lot of stupidity including removing the System Tray because they the smarted designers ever decided that they know better and all other non GNOME software needs to follow their designed if they want the privilege to work as expected under GNOME.

ByteJockey 4y ago

There's a long tradition of just naming things what they are. ed (editor) vi (visual) and emacs (editor macros) all stem from this. They're shorter, but when they were released (70s for all of them), there was a 6 character limit on a lot of systems for command names. Or do you mean why is there a space in the name? That would be annoying for launching from the terminal, I can see that.

alanbernstein 4y ago
There is a much shorter tradition of Ubuntu using dumb names like this, which are descriptive yes, but also too generic. "Vi" is not "just naming the editor what it is", it's a relatively distinct short name that doesn't actually mean anything unless you know the reason for the name (which I did not for years after being introduced to it). At some point recently, Ubuntu stopped using "nautilus" as the name of the file manager, and now it's just called "files". Except, wait, that's some kind of alias, so the process name is still nautilus after you start it. If you don't know the relationship between the GUI name alias, and the literal process name, how are you supposed to figure it out? How are you supposed to search for info or help about "files"? It's too generic.
- ByteJockey 4y ago
  > "Vi" is not "just naming the editor what it is", it's a relatively distinct short name that doesn't actually mean anything unless you know the reason for the name (which I did not for years after being introduced to it). But "visual" is was vi is. That's its grand innovation. It took a lot of it's (non-motion) commands straight from ed, but let you see the entire page of text as you changed it. ed didn't do this because it needed to be conscious of teletype machines. It's a direct abbreviation of ex's "visual" command (and used to just launch you into ex in visual mode), and everyone using it at the time would have known what it meant. > If you don't know the relationship between the GUI name alias, and the literal process name, how are you supposed to figure it out? Oh boy. If you do not appreciate doing deep lore spelunking to understand things, the unix/linux ecosystems are going to be frustrating for you. Half of our stuff still pretends it's operating on those old character based teletype machines I mentioned earlier. > How are you supposed to search for info or help about "files"? Do you have the same problem with the "fork" call?