[SML] Software for theatrical lighting

[*Hobbit*]

Hooboy, you're gonna get about as many opinions back as there are list
members, to hint at the popular other way of phrasing it.  I've done my
share of rants about Eos/Nomad over its course of development, and would
up front agree that it is NOT for the novice in any respect.

Basically, and this is my own opinion mind you, it feels to me like ETC took
the fairly established workflow of the existing intelligent consoles like
Hog and MA and Avo, turned it sideways and renamed everything, and committed
to that as their product line.  It's very easy to get angry at, and sit there
thinking "wait, what??  Why don't they just do it this simpler way that
we're all already used to?"  To be fair, some steps in programming workflow
have been shortened or optimized a bit, but you still have to study and
internalize the differences between "workspace", "frame", "display", page and
scroll, "tab" versus "escape", and that's just the basic navigation.  Then
comes the challenge of figuring out how to patch some stuff before you get
to output a single command to the rig, and after that the additional, ah,
"sneaky" puzzle of how turn stuff off again.  Then scratch your head when
your LED units keep coming up in full white when you hadn't done anything
with color controls yet, or why your *wash* movers are in tiny pin-beams
until you grab the zoom wheel and fix it ...

So you dig back into the 600+ page manual and realize that you're finding
either typos or where clear distinctions are NOT made between [hardkey] and
{softkey}, as you desperately scan the facepanel for what turns out to not
be there at all but will perhaps show up in the "skeys" if you hammer on
"displays" the right number of times or start a particular class of command
line.  Oh wait, you just wanted to record a sub to a fader?  Whoops, it
turned into a playback that just asserted control away from your main cuelist
and it takes another ten minutes to figure out why.

Frankly, as some of y'all would say across the pond, it's pants.

Possibly fortunately, ETC seems to own High End now, so perhaps the Hog folks
have been throwing enough hints over the wall that we will eventually see
these universes collide in not-completely-bastardized way.  But my not so
private view is that they're catching up from about a decade behind and are
shredding a thesaurus into the mix the whole way.  It never felt like
innovation and industry progress to me, it felt like a setback and being
forced to convert to a different religion.

To be fair, a few of the shortcut models do make sense -- such as implicit
fanning in selections and values , such as "1 thru 16 at 20 thru full", or
"65 color @ enter" to remove data completely.  I'm still stumbling across
various useful key sequences that perform some bit of magic in the background,
and appreciate those few bright sparks of reasonable design thought.  The guys
doing those Youtubes for ETC often just gloss right over this, but you can
catch some neat workflow features if you're paying attention.

Basically, Eos is a complex scripting language, and it's almost essential to
have a few "helper scripts" in your toolkit to bring to bear before trying
to program a show in the first place.  The pros working in this world every
day are said to bring a ton of baseline stuff with them and about the first
action when sitting down at a fresh console is to load [or is that merge?] all
that from their magic thumbdrive.  I do not have such a toolkit yet, just a
couple of macros I can remember to pound in first -- such as "goto-cue out
time 0 <> clear sneak 0 <>" for the instant reset-to-dark I so often need.

I'm actually heading into a show on an "Ion classic" this month, and am
living in this world once again after a long hiatus.  I have a wheezy old
instance of "Eos Family" on my Mac that's lost its ability to save files
for some reason, but it's enough to fire up and try a few things to then
bring to the real board later.  At least I'll be able to actually use the
handful of movers in the space this time, where 3 years ago I wasn't about
to try that on their old Express board.  Their TD himself doesn't use the
Ion, he uses some other laptop package for his own shows, so I'm kinda on
my own with this.  I'm sure I'll get through it and come out a better Eos
jockey in the end, but jeez, I keep just doubting the true merit of that as
a life skill.

I might make yet another "ETC rant" webpage out of this...

To take a stab at the OP's first question... exiting may be able to get done
through the "browser", mouse down to "exit" or "shut down", and let it do
its internal cleanup??  The Mac has the usual Mac controls at the top, so
I can bail out that way as well.

_H*