Not enough naming consistency in Linux UI

Not enough naming consistency in Linux UI(openusability.blogspot.com)

1 points by bitbandit 10 years ago | 3 comments

Glyptodon 10 years ago |

Perhaps a deeper issue is that the "Name" of a program in human terms is very unlikely to ever match a name that you'd use on the command line unless it's only one word long.

wmf 10 years ago | |

This is a bug in Unix culture and an example of spray-on usability. It's perfectly legal to have a file named "Software Manager" and it's not even harder to type if your shell has case-insensitive completion. Yet the situation persists where the "human-readable name" is different from the "internal name". (Not that people generally launch GUI apps from the command line anyway.)

bitbandit 10 years ago | | |

Calling an executable "Software Manager" is legal, but it's also inconsistent with other executables.

In this case the executable is "mintinstall" and it could have been called software-manager or softwaremanager.

You are right, the human readable name is generally different from the internal name, but the internal name should be invisible to a GUI user.

Here the problem is that the name of the executable has made its way to the GUI.