Re: Great SWT Program

Example: I dabble a little with Eclipse. For reasons that seem
good to me (though that might be debatable), I often create groups
of small projects in which the source code lives somewhere other
than in Eclipse's workspace. If I move that source code later,
I haven't found any way to tell Eclipse about that other than to
delete the old projects and create new ones, one at a time, using
the GUI, which I find tedious beyond words. If configuration
information were stored in text files, I could just do a
mass edit and change all occurrences of OldPathToSource with
NewPathToSource, which would be a lot less work. (Risky? Maybe.
If I were worried, I'd make a backup copy of everything first.)

I have other examples, but lack the energy right now to describe
them. But it just often seems to me that a task that ought to be
simple, or at least automatable with some sort of scripting --
"tell Eclipse that source for all of these projects has been
moved", in the example above -- is impossible to accomplish
without a lot of tedious pointing and clicking. To me this
reflects a fundamental limitation of GUIs -- if the designer
didn't think of a particular function and provide an interface
to it, it can't be done. It's a trade-off, I guess, with the
benefits of the GUI being novice-friendliness. <shrug>