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Simplicity In the Age Of The GUI
evenprime writes: "Wired is running a story on Mark Hurst's extremely retro GoodEasy computing environment, and how it's old fashioned *nix approach to computing -- flat text, small simple programs that can be chained together -- increases user productivity" It's an interesting, hyper-simple approach, though any user outside of Mark's agency would have to apply some creative adaption. Every few months, I try to re-organize and simplify the documents and programs on my system, this looks like a good experiment for the next time.
it lacks to take into account needs of different users, as well as it assumes that everyone is an office drone that only does two, three tasks on their default-set Dell with a bunch of aliases everywhere.
I like the overall idea of simple computing, but the fact is that power users, who use their machines multiple tasks, would not find most of the recommendations in this article useful.
Sorting out and organizing stuff according to your preference and style of computing is something that may work best for you.
I think that saying that 'this is the only good way' or 'this is the good way, other way is a bad way' is shortsighted and unreasonable. Some people cannot afford to have only 4 folders for specific purposes. And desktop was a designed as a place for aliases that allows you to organize and speed up the workflow.
After all, I feel that "GoodEasy" computing environment is not one that is as simple, basic, and unified as it can be. The real "GoodEasy" computing environment is the one that allows you to feel most comfortable in and lets you be most productive, depending on the tasks, work ethic, type of work, and your preferences.
And I think most people who program under some kind of unix do too. It's a combination of the GUI and the command line, not choosing between the two.
.emacs and .Xresources files that I can't work without (I can use vi just fine though). At least my preferences aren't in some registry.
Windows users can't seem to grasp it for some reason. In my Red Hat class last quarter, whenever the Windows users needed a terminal they hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a virtual console instead of just opening a terminal emulator. And when they did discover that the terminal emu did everything that the console did, they still didn't grasp the idea that they could have more than one terminal on the screen at once.
The only problem is that no operating system default is set up exactly how I want, so when I get to a new system, it takes me a while to set everything up the way I like... it's especially silly having to carry around a copy of my
Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and much of Access, are all built around the idea that bits are most useful when converted to atoms.
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Unix uses quick-to-transmit plain text files instead of large, slow, printer-centric documents. Unix ties together multiple small programs to create systems both simple and powerful, instead of building complicated, monolithic applications that must compromise between flexibility and ease-of-use.
So Microsoft application's are based on the idea that computer users eventually want paper but Unix isn't -- but it's text-based?
I personally prefer to develop my code in a Unix, non-IDE environment, but I still think that piping text around is a real throwback. Even slightly advanced users will find themselves gluing bits of data together in a single line of text, and then using something along the lines of regular expressions to pull it apart.
For example, think about stdout and stderr. In Unix, you need two separate streams. Interleaving them is a bad idea because then you can't tell text in one stream from text in the other. You could have a single stream of output if each item in the stream were, let's say, a Text object or an Error object. You could then, in the next application down the pipe, choose to examine either Text object or Error objects, or pay attention to both. Also, the interleaving of Text and Error objects would convey useful information; something that's harder with two independent streams.
If you like the ideas of command-line, and small functional units that can be composed, and you want to build an environment from scratch, why focus on text as the main paradigm? Other things that programs could input, output and pass around include objects and tuples, which would have more intuitive tools for putting together and taking apart complex data that would otherwise be encoded into a line of text.
I find it much easier to find stuff that's been strewn over my desk. Whenever I file it away in a meaningful fashion, it's too much effort to go and find it. Also, out of sight, out of mind...
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
my desktop.
Along the left side of my screen are launchers for my most often-used programs. Thanks to badgering of programmers on my part they respond to edge-clicks, making them easy targets.
The top of my screen has hacked versions of the deskguide and tasklist which also respond to edge-clicks. Thus, I can switch desktops and windows quite quickly with the mouse
I have a transparent terminal for when I need it. The large panel on the bottom is auto-hide. The applets there are too big to fit on a 24 pixel panel. Brak is there for dancing to music.
I don't believe the Keyboard is God, I think my setup is quite efficient, pleasant to look at, and very functional.
I always thought that WordPerfect 5.1 was the pinnacle of word processors. I had the priviledge (or curse depending on your point of view) of running for a law firm back when WP5.1 was the standard bearer, and when we began moving to the GUI-centric Word, the administrative staff rose up in revolt. They were so crafty with those keystrokes, it was simply amazing. I gravitated towards Word myself, because it was sexier and I was young and immature ;) but I can guarantee you I was no more productive or quicker with Word than any of those secretaries were with crusty old WordPerfect 5.1.
Tabs in MacOS (8.0 and later, I think) are one of the best user interfaces ever developed. I don't just have one tab, I have six, breaking up my aliases to different applications into logical categories. It's an amazing time saver, and beats the Windoz start menu by a long shot. Unfortunately, tabbed windows are not present in OSX (at least, not as I remember... my personal machine is too slow for OSX, but plenty fast for LinuxPPC).
No, wait! Don't mod me down just yet! Look at goatse.cx! The goatse.cx man is not on the front page anymore! They're mourning what happened in NY! Seriously!
...a program that watches what I type and when it sees me repeating a word or phrase several times, suggests a short cut without interrupting me, e.g. displaying it in the info bar at the bottom of the window. For example, if I keep typing "String", it might suggest [S][T][space] as the shortcut.
I don't want to have to stop working and think up shortcuts since the computer would be better at identifying which words and phases I use most. I don't want the computer to try to guess what I'm going to do next since no matter how good it was, it would still piss me off when it was wrong (and it's none of the computer's business whether I'm writing a letter).
Where can I find it?
A friend of mine has often commented that we've sold our soul to the GUI. His point is that GUIs don't always make life easier. People seem to focus on GUI for GUI's sake. I think that GUIs can make life easier, but not always.
Even when GUIs do make life easier, often the investment is not worh it -- Developers spend so much time on the GUI that either underlying functionality suffers or the entire program is bug-ridden.
What are your views on this?
What are some good alternatives to GUI development? Do you use any libraries for creating nice text-based apps with simple interfaces? If so, which ones?
Of course the combination of some sort of a GUI and command line is very powerful, having the best of both worlds. Even in a graphical environment you can do most things with the keyboard in a more efficient way. I don't understand fancy mice with wheels and all when the good ol' keyb does the scrolling just as well. That's literally reinventing the wheel.
What's interesting that in the 80s and early 90s people were quite happy to learn shortcuts in DOS applications; someone already mentioned WP5.1 being more efficient than Word. Then came the GUI and suddenly everything just had to be graphical, even many things that have nothing to do with graphics.
Speaking of IMs, I am more than happy with MICQ. That is IMHO the easiest and most natural interface to IM. The command line.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The same thing can make BASIC programs work faster. In essence, one writes for Z=function(X,Y):
A1=X:A2=Y:GOSUB {function}:Z=A1
If you think about the functions you use, you can make, and where the output is placed, you can replace the one function with serveral functions.
Interestingly, the people who fiddle around with lots of little tools will split the problem into lots of smaller ones when a single larger tool would be faster. The tools are often on hand, and are faster to assemble than it is to write one big tool. The bigger tool should be looked at if one is doing lots of the same task. The reference for this is Knuth "Literate Programming".
The increase in productivity is because the CLI forces one to consider the data structures earlier, eg, up front, and this is the right thing to do.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.