Posted by signa11 12 hours ago
As a software develop I have numerous web browser windows with tabs, numerous IDE instances with tabs, numerous terminal windows (I avoid tabs but other people love 'em), Slack, Outlook and a few other things. I really want a system-scope panoptic view of all this stuff and a system that has a strong statistical tendency to put the next thing I'm interested in my face and not the opposite tendency which has been the dominant paradigm since GNU emacs and is just as bad in current IDEs.
The only change to the CLI since I first learned it over 40 years ago is that it's gotten bigger and clearer and most desktops allow me to have multiple CLIs I can switch between.
A graphical user experience is all about how to limit what I can do in an effort to make it easier to learn. Imagine a hammer designed for ease of use by a beginning carpenter: remove the dangerous claw and nasty thumb-crushing head and replace the handle in case you hold it wrong and you end up with a nice oven mitt. The chattering classes on social media can coo over its colours and textures. Meanwhile actual carpenters smirk, hitch up their trousers (or, often, not) and switch on their nail gun.
So go ahead and build your bike shed with a box a nails and a pair of taupe quilted cotton hammers with a pattern of garden vegetables stamped on the back.
1. Carpenters are often women who like wearing skirts at work 2. Many carpenters are Scottish and prefer to dress traditionally 3. Carpentry is incredibly progressive career where many men wear skirts to work 4. Carpenters regardless of gender like to work nude
No, wait, I get it now 5. Carpenters let their trousers hang, resulting in the cleavage of their buttocks showing when they reach over.
Damn, I was getting exited over male carpenters wearing skirts to work.
Watch some videos of top-ranking aim trainer players so see how high the human skill ceiling is for mouse control, and look at the hardware they're using.
In rare cases, even the "CLI native" tasks are easier to do in GUI, like for example sifting through a really big log dumps with long lines, or configuring a really long configuration file, or editing a giant nested JSON.
People use computers for other stuff than coding. And for most of those workflows a command line doesn't serve.
Which you can't get without modernization because pre-modern solutions don't offer that. But also, what do you do throughout your "entire life" if you want to customize something to do what's not implemented? That's also modernization.
Effectively all you're asking for is a simple opt in so you can change at your own pace
What kind of "modernisation" do you think is necessary for that? XFCE like 12 years ago was already pretty customizable and it remains customizable. Themes, colors, button layouts, some behavior and effects can be changed. XFCE panel allows full customization - I can choose its position, start button logo and text, shortcuts and other elements. It's as flexible as it can be.
> It's as flexible as it can be
Is it as flexible as allowing users to enable users the OS-wide app interaction ideas described in the blog/video presentation?
I hope Scott keeps spreading the good word and inspiring others to take different perspectives
Scott is a very good presenter, and he clearly thinks about this stuff a lot. I really liked the demo for moving windows to the sides of the screen, since it's kind of how I use the alt-tab interface -- look at the preview for the window/app I'm looking for then tab to it or click on it. Having a visual overview of all currently open windows could be useful to me. (It might actually get me to close things I'm not currently working on! Although my dozens and dozens of browser tabs tell a different story...)
I feel this so much.
I think that there's a "better" windowing system where all of your stuff sticks around way more than it used to. Clipboard history, but also just "oh you have these windows open while working on this task".
People have really leaned into coding harnesses + chat windows as a way of grouping together work. I think there's a more general idea in this space. Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me!
There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces (that I close out when I'm done). Desktop Environments that make this work nicely will be quite cool IMO
(A simple and dumb version of this is the BeOS "group various windows together, even though they aren't from the same application" stuff. Very cool stuff IMO
I feel this. When I first got to learn what a workspace was (in Eclipse, of all things), and I really drilled down into the English meaning of it (I'm Dutch), I thought about exactly what you're describing right now.
There's also a thing of wanting "http referer"-style things but at the desktop. I want things that tell me _from where_ I clicked into a page in the browser (like "oh you got here from Slack (at this spot)"
Desktop history, clipboard history... all associated to certain contexts. Would be quite nice IMO
IMO, even the clipboard metaphor is too much state. We already have the selection highlight, which has the nice benefit of being directly visible. This should be reduced to a single global selection highlight. Then copy and paste can be replaced by "duplicate highlighted selection here", eliminating the possibility of forgetting what's in the paste buffer.
Whole drive encryption reduces the risks too.
What you're describing sounds like it has been possible for a long time.
I've been doing it on my Linux desktop for decades. I throw things into workspaces which just ... stay open until I'm done with it. The same windows with the same layout and the same history and state, everything right where I left it. They stick around as long as they need to, which can be weeks, months, even years. I even have some desktops which have stuck around since the 1900s, though they do gradually change and evolve over time.
... and any windows from any program can be grouped together. Grouped into a desktop, or even grouped into a single window frame with tabs.
And nearly everything is automatically logged, so I have detailed history going back well into the past.
This stuff isn't in the big mainstream UIs, but it is at least possible with a bit of work to set it all up.
One area where I haven't seen much improvement is in controls. There haven't been any new controls for ages. In the 90's we got the tab control, tree control and spinner. Has the evolution of controls stagnated over the years?
The part where I immediately tune out is A.I. I don't want an A.I. controlling my desktop let alone changing anything on my filesystem. KDE would do well to completely ignore A.I. integration.