graphic pipes (was: where to do line editing?)

[Brandon S. Allbery]

As quoted from <10498 at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> by cjc at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Chris Calabrese[rs]):
+---------------
| In article <6246 at chinet.chi.il.us>, les at chinet.UUCP writes:
| > Hmmm, could they really pick out, say 'tr', from 2 or 3 hundred similar
| > tools faster than typing the name in?  What about command line options?
| > Most tools need more than a filename.  If selecting the icon would then
| > present a form of choices for arguments and do some error checking before
| > going on to the next tool, there might be some advantage.
| 
| For a good implimentation(sp?) of how to have command line options
| and icons living together, check out the way it's done on the
| (gak, gag, gawk, etc) Atari ST under the GEM desktop.
+---------------

The MacOS already knows about multiple entry points in an application (read:
program), so it shouldn't be too much trouble for a pipe-stringing mode
(in System 8.0, which is supposed to have fully pre-emptive process
scheduling instead of the MultiFinder hack) to open the application in
"dialog" mode, where it can pop up a dialog box to get any necessary
arguments via the usual menu/field/button/etc. interface.  (Maybe some
enterprising A/UX hacker -- if such exist yet -- could try implementing
this?)

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery, uunet!marque!ncoast!allbery			DELPHI: ALLBERY
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