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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.
But thats where i keep all my STUFF!!
*tip of the hat to The Tick*
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
My wife uses our Mac at home. She clutters her desktop with icons, rarely empties the trash can unless I tell her it's essential, and (like the article says) never looks for more than one way to do a task, once she's found a way that works.
My office email is filled with people mailing MS Word documents to me for Web-related projects. Often there's nothing in these documents but plain text and some bolded topic headlines. If I try to convert them to HTML to make my job easier, it doesn't work, because MS litters Word-generated HTML with styles and nonstandard tags that only IE5 can understand, all to make the Web page look as much like the Word doc as possible.
Friends use instant messenging to send me short, two-sentence "hi"s throughout the day. Half of them use brightly-colored backgrounds, harshly-contrasting text colors, and hard-to-read fonts because they look cool to them. They rarely use good spelling or punctuation to make sentences easier to read. "KISS" is a slogan that has never occurred to them. They probably never empty their desktop trash, either.
All these people have something in common: they don't think like a computer. It doesn't occur to them that searching for data is easier if everything is in plain text, or that organizing your files into directories makes them easier to archive and find later, or that removing all the pretty colors and fonts and complicated layouts would make it easier for others to read what they've written. They're just here to have fun.
They're the reason for XP's Luna and MacOS's Aqua. Pretty colors and gradients don't help anyone get the job done, but it makes the computer more "friendly" and less computer-like.
Meanwhile, I send all my IM's in high-contrast colors and sans-serif fonts. I email plain text whenever possible and RTF whenever it's not. I organize my files pathologically so that I don't have to throw old things away to find new things. And my desktop background picture is only two colors: medium blue and navy, so it doesn't distract or take half a minute to redraw whenever I minimize my browser.
Because I do think like a computer. I like plain, readable text; I solve problems logically; and (unfortunately) I have a "stateless" memory which loses track of one thing as soon as it starts another. Keeping everything in neat lines and plainly-marked boxes is the only way for me to get any work done.
But if I didn't spend 8-12 hours a day in front of a computer screen, I probably wouldn't know that. I'd probably prefer the pretty colors and chaotic fonts, too.
Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and much of Access, are all built around the idea that bits are most useful when converted to atoms.
...
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.
All these people have something in common: they don't think like a computer. It doesn't occur to them that searching for data is easier if everything is in plain text, or that organizing your files into directories makes them easier to archive and find later, or that removing all the pretty colors and fonts and complicated layouts would make it easier for others to read what they've written. They're just here to have fun.
The reverse is also true, y'know. Most UIs need to be redesigned (hence Luna and Aqua) because they weren't made to work with someone who thinks like a person. Specifically a business person.
Y'know, someone where the trash is emptied regularly, where chatting is a way of life, and where things are filed long-term, but they're also kept short-term on the desk--not because they're filed there, but because they stay there because you *haven't* filed them.
The ideal would actually be the best of both worlds. Filters that can convert an e-mail attachment at a single command. A switch to filter out your "buddy's" preferences. And a way to have files you open and don't "file" head to the desktop, where they're periodically "saved" as a backup.
Too bad we'll never get that ideal.
My wife uses our Mac at home. She clutters her desktop with icons, rarely empties the trash can unless I tell her it's essential
Wow. My wife gets mad at me because I clutter my desktop with papers and rarely empty the trash unless she yells at me to do it.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
And you know what? I have lots of friends now, and I regularly sleep with two beautiful women at once. I've got another perl script that filters their cruft into my own vanilla format. You might say I've developed my own private babelfish. Things are good for me. They could be good for you too.
Embrace and extend, grasshopper.
The part in goodeasy where he says "your first job is to clear off the desktop" reminds me of two funny calls I had when I did Mac tech support (which by the way, is 10x easier than the Windows tech support I do now but only 1/10 as easy as the VM/CMS support I did years ago)...
In the first call I determined the cause of their problem was that their hard drive was full. Caller disagreed so I Timbuktu'd in and examined their hard drive and showed them it was full. Caller said I was still wrong as "All of my documents are kept in this folder on the desktop". They took the mouse and opened a folder on their desktop... sure enough it contained hundreds of (MS Office) files. "See, all of my files are on the desktop, not on my hard drive." Of course I had explained that what is on the desktop is really on the hard drive too. The user says "You mean they are not stored in the monitor?"
The second caller was a person who kept all of their files in their trash (recycle bin for you Win people). When I asked them why they said "That way they won't take any disk space!". I explained that they actually do and in addition to it being rather awkward to keep all their files in the trash they ran the risk that somebody else using their computer would empty the trash and wipe out their files. User says "Yes, that has happened several times already".
UGGHHHHH!
...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?
You can grab binaries for several OSs, binaries of other programs which have incorporated Tidy into themselves, or get the source. Hope that this works for you.