Enhancing the user experience with tcsh

[Miroslav Lachman]

Eitan Adler wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Astrodog<astrodog at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Personally, I pay very little attention to the prompt. That being said...
>> Plenty of people prefer widely different configurations for the prompt.
>> I think everyone agrees that the default prompt isn't particularly
>> informative, however, achieving consensus here is going to be almost
>> impossible. I suggest that it be handled as a seperate discussion,
>> perhaps?
>
> That would result in even more of a bikeshed than this thread. I'm
> pretty sure I'm going to go with one of the prompts posted to this
> thread after a bit of experimentation.
> Remember that the prompts are for inexperienced users and those of you
> with awesome prompts are not the target audience for the change.

Not just prompts, but everything in default .cshrc / .tcshrc should be 
targeted to inexperienced new users and we should look at it from this 
point of view. Not from "our personal preferences".
The current and future changes in .cshrc is not targeted to us - readers 
of freebsd-current@, but to new users comming from the world of windows 
and penguins.

I still remember those days when I came from Win95 to FreeBSD 4.x and 
didn't know anything about shell's possibilities. Somebody recommends me 
bash and I used it as my default shell for a couple of years - until I 
realized, that same or better prompt, completion and history search can 
be achieved with already installed csh / tcsh. Just by few modifications 
in .cshrc.

I don't think readers of this mailing list are using default unmodified 
.cshrc. So the question is not "what is good to me" (or to you), but 
"what is good for new users?". What can we serve them to make their life 
easier and show them the power and possibilities of tcsh.

We all can still use our good old .cshrc modifications, our own prompt, 
colors, etc. as we already do.

That's why I am proposing as much "Good features (TM)" enabled by 
default as possible. Because we others can easily disabled them if we 
don't like them. But new users can't enabled them, because they don't 
know about them.

Miroslav Lachman