The Humane Environment

rael9real writes "Jeff Raskin, developer of the MacOS and author of The Humane Interface [ed.: which was reviewed last year], has been hard at work with several others coding The Humane Environment. They have a developers edition out for Christmas. It runs on Mac OS 9/X. Reading the manual, it is basically a text editor/Python IDE, but it does seem to incorporate some neat ideas in the field. I can't wait to get home and try it out!"

Comments

Thank god for thinking of hte children

[Anonymous Coward]

VI is most assuredly not humane. :wq! Who wants to do that??

Re:Thank god for thinking of hte children

[shaitand]

ahem

:x

Jeff Raskin is EVIL!

[titzandkunt]

Look at the friggin' picture on his page! He's a BORG fer chrissakes!

what about decimal ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it infected with the decimal radix?

Nice redundant acronym!

[RoufTop]

What's THE?
THE Humane Environment!

But what's THE? :-)
- rouftop

Re:Nice redundant acronym!

[RoufTop]

make that "recursive." Doh!

Re:Nice redundant acronym!

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, but who's on first?
(with apologies to Abbott & Costello)

Re:Nice redundant acronym!

[Ponty]

Don't worry, it's fairly redundant, too.

And here's the crux of the matter...

[Hayzeus]

From the website:

Important observation: You cannot make an interface better without making it different (that's obvious).

Herein lies the problem: an interface that requires relearning can, at least in a sense, be said to be flawed. Time that has to be spent up front learning a new interface is widely perceived as wasted time. In order to be accepted, interfaces generally have to be incremental improvements on an existing paradigm. Radically new interfaces, no matter how much they improve on existing UIs, are almost certainly doomed to failure.

There are obvious exceptions. GUIS were such an improvement over CLIs (at least for the masses) that they were readily accepted. I guess the same could really be said for the ascendancy of the CLI over batch jobs.

Maybe a direct neural interface...

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[geek]

I think history has proved the opposite. Win 3.1 to Win95 was a major UI change. Mac OS9 to OSX has been a major UI change. CDE to GNOME is a major UI change.

It seems to me the only people making incremental improvements is Microsoft (winNT-win2k-winXP). We all just love the Windows GUI right?

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[pVoid]

Important observation: You cannot make an interface better without making it different (that's obvious).

I think herein lies the biggest conceit of them all.

It is this type of behaviour that instantly picks out an accomplished programmer from a novice... "Oh, I'll write my own string library to make it faster"...

Bullshit. You can build on small things that already exist right now. Maybe change some major things, but keep the tried and true methods. It's called Refactoring in the world Extreme Programming... and I think it should be a philosophy of life for every human on this planet.

On another note, I'd really like to see a working prototype... Anyone have a link?

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[bjelkeman]

Maybe a direct neural interface...

I think you forget, as most people seem to, that all learning takes effort. Even when your gear is hooked straight into your brain do you have to spend substantial time to learn how to use it. Learning to walk takes time, watch a child. Learning a new human language takes years, not only for a grown up person. Learning any new skill takes time. I think that nearly anything which does not involve learning probably isn't worth doing in the end.

One of the most effective computer interfaces I have ever used was a document publishing system interface. It took time to learn how to use it, but boy was it powerful once you new how to use it. I think it is time to get away from the notion of the user interface with no learning curve. That user interface is the user interface which doesn't have any power. The trick is a user interface which grows in power as you learn how to use it, that is the real challenge.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Hayzeus]

Win 3.1 to Win95 was not a major UI change -- it required learning almost nothing new to use. I can't speak for OS9-OSX, but I assume the case was the same.

Regardless of your (or my own) feelings on the Windows GUI, which of the interfaces you named in your posting has had the widest acceptance?

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 3x to 95 was a major UI change? How so? Windows 95 is Windows 3.11 with an added start/program bar.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Hayzeus]

I think you forget, as most people seem to, that all learning takes effort. Even when your gear is hooked straight into your brain do you have to spend substantial time to learn how to use it.

No -- I am aware that any interface takes time to learn, and I assume that a neural interface would be no exception. But the real issue is whether the perceived investment in time spent learning something new is worth the perceived benefit of the interface. The more radical the change, the higher the perceived value needs to be. Note the term "perceived" -- in order for an interface to succeed, a sufficient number of people need to see it as potentially worth the trouble of learning; else I would expect it to fade into obscurity.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[TheAJofOZ]

It is this type of behaviour that instantly picks out an accomplished programmer from a novice... "Oh, I'll write my own string library to make it faster"...

Ahh, but if I were to give you a string library that had fundamental design flaws you would be a fool not to change it regardless of how long it had been in use or how popular it was. You may not have to change everything (or perhaps you might) but you will have to make some major changes.

Bullshit. You can build on small things that already exist right now. Maybe change some major things, but keep the tried and true methods.

Close, but not quite. Firstly, Raskin isn't saying that absolutely everything should be thrown out as you imply, but rather that he and his team are changing some major things but keeping the good parts. Secondly, don't keep the tried and true, keep the good stuff. Just because it's been in use for a long time doesn't mean it's the best that can be done nor does it mean it even works correctly. It only means that noone has gotten around to making something better.

The attitude that we should stick with the tried and true would have caused us to stick with using bubble sort for all eternity. Only a novice programmer would think they can write a faster sort algorithm right?

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[costas]

Someone used to have a sig around here: "The only intuitive interface is the nipple, everything else is learned". That still holds true: interfaces are compromises; they require both parties interfacing to meet part of the way and lose some of their comfort and convenience. The advantage of human-machine interfaces is that we control the one party completely (yes, I am talking about the machine).

If a new interface comes along that moves that compromise closer to the human sid, so that the operator gains convenience and/or comfort, the human will gladly learn the new interface as there is a gain to be made, past experience be damned. That's simple economics.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[pyros]

an interface that requires relearning can, at least in a sense, be said to be flawed. Time that has to be spent up front learning a new interface is widely perceived as wasted time

I once read, and I agree, that "the only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything after that is learned". So everything other than sucking on nipples is a waste of time. I like the way you think ...

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[MadsPedersen]

There is some truth to this - but there could still be hope for new UIs - even short of a direct neural interface ;-) The dominant GUI of today (still) relies on the desktop metaphor. The power of this was to take something known to us and expand on it. While there are a number of well documented flaws to this way of thinking a GUI it certainly has it's merits. But the key to radically better UIs does not necessarily lie in creating better version of this. The next-generation UI could be based on something even more familiar to us than the desktop. Our body (when functioning correctly) could be considered the ultimate UI between our brain and the world. This means that we already know a lot of things. F.instance, the existence of four dimensions (space+time) is so deeply rooted in our consciousness that we take it for granted. Don't want to go on about this for too long but it seems there is a lot to be won by working on creating UIs that seem "natural" to the way we act and perceive our world.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Mournblade]

Actually, as anyone who has had a child can attest, the nipple is not intuitive. The breastfeeding process has to be learned both by the mother, and the child.

Now, maybe you weren't referring to breastfeeding, in which case I may agree with you.... ;)

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Lord_Scrumptious]

Hayzeus originally wrote:

"...an interface that requires relearning can, at least in a sense, be said to be flawed. Time that has to be spent up front learning a new interface is widely perceived as wasted time. In order to be accepted, interfaces generally have to be incremental improvements on an existing paradigm. Radically new interfaces, no matter how much they improve on existing UIs, are almost certainly doomed to failure."

Another way of looking at this is to ask: will learning the new interface allow me to accomplish tasks with greater ease and in less time than if I continue with the current (or slightly improved) interface?

If we continue to build on top of an already flawed design, we will perpetuate the underlying faults in that design. Of course, if we're so used to certain conventions and practices, we probably won't even see them as flaws, merely the "natural" way to do things (just because it's always been done that way).

I do concede your point though. New interfaces do face an uphill struggle if they radically break with convention. I wouldn't say they are doomed to failure though. We should start thinking of training and program assistance as an integral part of any piece of software. Perhaps it's time to banish the idea that software can be inherently "intuitive". That word is used so often nowadays, it's lost any useful meaning regarding how easy software is to use (or at least I think so!).

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Juanvaldes]

the windows GUI had nothing to do with microsofts come to dominate the consumer market. But it did help it stay there (good enough argument)

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Spellbinder]

Just because it's been in use for a long time doesn't mean it's the best that can be done nor does it mean it even works correctly.

hmm, a good example is windows
so keep the bluescreens ... everyone is used to them.. and drop stability and security
because nobody is used to it

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[natefanaro]

so where was your start menu in windows 3.1?

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Hayzeus]

Ummm... A "Start" menu does not constitute a major UI change, although I suppose it depends on the standard you use. Personally, I would file that one under "minor incremental change".

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Herein lies the problem: an interface that requires relearning can, at least in a sense, be said to be flawed. Time that has to be spent up front learning a new interface is widely perceived as wasted time.

This is truth, but a truth so academic as to be of almost no value. By decoupling a task from the way in which that task is performed -as you are implicitly doing-, you end up with an abstraction called "interface" that is so broad that is covers only the most basic applications.

To separate these two is a mistake (often) because the interface and the task are intimately coupled. Another way of putting it is that radically new tasks call for radically new interfaces and vice versa. What fails is not radically new interfaces per se -- but radically new interfaces without a corresponding new task.

By your argument, because both PhotoShop and MS Word use more or less the same "interface" (using the word in the bland way that you use it), it should be easy to learn Word once you know Photoshop and vice versa. But in reality, the superficial similarity of both interfaces helps only a tiny bit in mastering the tasks that these applications perform. The learning curve is in the task: not in the interface.

Conversely, it does not take long for a WordPerfect 5.1 DOS user to master Microsoft Word. Not because the "interface paradigms" (ummm, okay) are similar; they could hardly differ more! But, because the tasks are similar.

Form follows function and function is shaped by form.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the novice, right?

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[geek]

Start menu, windowing toolkit, API's, the fact that you start in a GUI rather than DOS and then switch to a GUI.

I fail to see how you can't see win 3.1 to win95 as major. Did you even use 3.1?

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[jbolden]

How hard was the switch from Win 3.1 to Win95 for you? I remember making the switch and I was productive instantly without training or learning. That means obviously it wasn't a major change since I knew what to do. I think moderate change is a better term.

Now a genuinely different UI (like a forth system) would require some training / learning.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[jbolden]

Someone used to have a sig around here: "The only intuitive interface is the nipple, everything else is learned".

Just a point of interest here. I gather the person whose sig that was didn't have kids. Newborns have a sucking reflex but they can't handle the nipple either when they are first born. They have no idea what the nipple is for and often grab onto the wrong part of the breast. It takes time for both and mother and child to get the handle on that UI. So even the nipple is learned :-)

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though 95 had major UI improvements, it did nothing to fundementally alter the CUA design that MS/IBM had used since the 80s.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

>> So even the nipple is learned :-)

Compared to learning the intricacies of the other erogenous zones, the nipple is a cinch! ;-)

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Daleks]

The trick is a user interface which grows in power as you learn how to use it, that is the real challenge.

The CLI has been just that for me. bash, sed, etc. have enormous power when combined, and the more I know how to use them, the more powerful I can be with just a terminal. The reason is the CLI as a whole is the composition of applications with very fine granularity. GUI's tend to be very specialized and combining operations is tedious. On the other hand, GUI's are extremely useful for simple tasks or tasks that are inherently visual, such as drawing.

My current OS is Mac OS X. This OS gets it right in terms of having a useful GUI and a powerful CLI interface (Desktop managers for other OS's do the same, but having not used them as much I won't comment on them). Being able to use both in a blended manner makes for a great experience. A combination approach is really the way to go.

The funny thing is that Mac users who despised the CLI are now trying it out in Mac OS X. I have many friends that are incorporating the CLI into their repertroire and enjoying it. The GUI is easy to pick up for simple tasks, while the CLI is harder to learn, but more useful for difficult tasks. Right tool for the job I suppose.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[B3ryllium]

A better example is X-Windows ... :) (Disclaimer: I make this post primarily because I absolutely detest X-Windows/Xfree86/X11R6 from an end-user standpoint. People who think they can use it to make UNIX a desktop OS are _insane_, in my opinion.)

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[stixman]

I think it is time to get away from the notion of the user interface with no learning curve. That user interface is the user interface which doesn't have any power.

According to Bruce Ediger:
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.

I would call the nipple quite a powerful interface, wouldn't you? :)

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Simon Brooke]

Herein lies the problem: an interface that requires relearning can, at least in a sense, be said to be flawed.

I won't deny there's a level of truth in what you say. For example, we're (almost) all still using qwerty keyboards not because they're a good keyboard design, and not, on the whole, because we can use them very efficiently, but because it's what people have used since the beginning of typewriting and the retraining cost of change is just too high.

But hey, wait a minute, the cost of relearning a user interface style is not necessarily high. Pretty much every computer game you play uses a non-standard user interaction style, and many of these games have really quite radically different user interaction styles. Many of these user interaction styles are far more in tune with current psychological and HCI research than the tired variants of WIMP noow used by Mac/Windows/KDE/Gnome et cetera. If users could not quickly learn these styles the games would go unsold and unplayed.

So I don't believe that a radically new user interaction style is impossible, provided that it is highly intuitive, highly consistent and easy to learn. The problem will be (as it always is when changing a user interface) that initially there won't be enough apps ported so that you will have to mix between older apps with an older interaction style and the new apps, robbing the system - at least initially - of the consistency and predictability which must ultimately be an important feature.

One possible strategy would be to take a widely used toolkit such as KDE and write your new user interface library to have the same API. The problem with this is that you may end up compromising your user interface design in order to support some features offered by the 'old' toolkit which don't really fit your new model.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[larry bagina]

pussy is quite intuitive as well.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[platypus]

Funny how easy this works without "assistants" popping out of the areola, heh?

Seriously, if there wouldn't be some intuition to it, a child would never be able to learn this stuff, so you both are right, I think.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Moridineas]

So it seems to me that you're defining any GUI that is WIMP as being the same.

3.1 -> 95 and OS9->OSX changed greatly:
-aesthetics of controls/windows
-method of keeping track of running programs
-MDI vs SDI etc
-Creation of the desktop
-Basic window controls (max,min)
-Basic method of exploring the harddrive

Maybe you could give your opinion on an example of a major gui change? (and let's keep it in reality, meaning something that has happened)

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, babies will naturally wiggle up the mothers stomach to get to the breasts. There maybe some learning involved, but most babies are born with hte innate ability to breast feed.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Hayzeus]

Start menu, windowing toolkit, API's, the fact that you start in a GUI rather than DOS and then switch to a GUI.

*sigh*

A start menu, while useful, does not represent a major paradigm shift. Neither does the fact that Windows versions prior to 95 needed to be started manually, especially since regular 3.1 users generally started it in autoexec.bat. In either case, there was very little in the way of relearning that needed to happen for 3.1 users to migrate to 95 -- and this, by the way, was by design. But, yes, 95 WAS a big improvment over 3.1. This was one of the last things Microsoft ever did (except for the introduction of NT) that was actually worth getting excited about.

I'm a little unclear on your point about windowing toolkits and APIs -- Windows APIs were published as early as 1.x, although they remained a moving target until 3.0. I myself was developing professionally by at least 3.0. Unless I've hallucinated a rather large chunk of my professional life along with the copy of Petzold's 1990 "Programming Windows" gathering dust over there on my bookshelf, there were plenty of APIs. Not that the presence or absence of specific APIs have anything to do with the nature of the human interface. If you believe that, then the advent of NT would have been a much greater leap from 95 than 95 from 3.1.

I fail to see how you can't see win 3.1 to win95 as major. Did you even use 3.1?

And, yes, in addition to actually writing code for Windows 3.1 and earlier, I did also actually use it. In fact, I used even erlier versions, going all the way back to whatever RT version was bundled with PageMaker 1.0 (which I believe was Windows 1.1), and I ran it on a freakin '286. That's right, boy -- I'm a geezer! And although you didn't ask, I also used (and in some case coded to) DesqView, GEOS, a little GEM and OS/2 going back to 1.1.

Surrender now and your women and children will be spared.

Re:And here's the crux of the matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have got to be joking...

if my grandmother could make the leap it is NOT a major change...

just because there are lots of changes under the hood a major UI change is one that requires the user to learn new ways of interfacing with the system... clicking on an X to close a window was not that big a thing to learn...

Now can we start saying...

[unterderbrucke]

YATE (Yet Another Text Editor)

Re:Now can we start saying...

[nmg]

Sorry, that's taken.

Re:Now can we start saying...

[stevejsmith]

BeOS!

OS 9 or OS X?

[cliffy2000]

Well, despite what the website says, it's only booting up under the Classic environment for me. So I guess Carbon implementation isn't finished yet. Ah well.

the rest of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

And the real problem with that is that the windowing interface has not had even minor changes in almost 20 years. Windows 3x was basically the same as what we have now (as far as GUIs).

The only incremental innovation in the last 20 years was a "start button/quickbar".

That's it. That's the one great accomplishment in 20 years.

This is part

[Anonymous Coward]

This is part of Raskin's interface project, but the main push is for a consumer ZUI.

what's it look like ?

[Tom]

I'm a visual being - what does it look like? Some screenshots with a bit of explanation would be nice. If I had a mac, I'd download and look for myself, but since I don't...

Re:what's it look like ?

[furballphat]

Here's a couple of screenshots I just knocked up.

Please be nice to my poor computer.

Re:what's it look like ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, how, umm, underwhelming.

Re:what's it look like ?

[Ponty]

It looks like a white square with text in it. It appears to be mostly keyboard. You can read the manual, but it really helps to be using the program at the same time.

And it's really funky! I'm trying, but it's fairly strange.

Re:what's it look like ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Were you nice to the screen shots you knocked up and abandoned?! Huh?! WERE YOU, PUNK?!

Re:what's it look like ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is that supposed to be and how is it better than vi? It looks much worse.

Re:what's it look like ?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I gather, this is a "demonstrator" for the principles first seen in the Canon Cat (and perhaps previously, in the SwiftCard or whatnot?).

Like most software previous to the adoption of the classic GUI, it makes no effort to be self-documenting, but if you pick up the manual, it should be consistent to learn, and quick to use once you're up to speed- which is the point.

Personally, I like a lot of what Raskin has to say... and I'm now happily "LEAP"ing along in ghetto style by making full use of the "Find" command in Netscape/Moz/IE- it really is much faster, oddly- but the problem is that the Humane/Cat interface was for a "work processor," which in the end comes down to dealing with documents, so it's a great interface for a text editor/programmer's editor/even a hypertext system... but for 'work' like network administration, the paradigm turns odd.

Of course, you *could* just load the "network ruleset" document on your router, with NAT/IPFilter embedded... but then you end up either hiding things- as with ECMAScript in HTML; you load the document and "magic happens" - or you get a big cluttery thing, sort of like those old mainframe hacks that drew a tea timer, and the drawing itself was the executable code...

Re:what's it look like ?

[Ponty]

"I'm now happily "LEAP"ing along in ghetto style by making full use of the "Find" command in Netscape/Moz/IE"

I thought that that was how most people did it. The "/" key is the one I use most in vi, and I make liberal use of cmd-f in OmniWeb. Hell, it's vaguely related to the research given to my by my roommate showing that people would rather use Google to access frequently-used sites than their bookmarks (I'm one of those.)

LEAP

[Queuetue]

LEAPing sounds like a reimplementation of Emacs' interactive search, only more confusing.

To anyone who has this running (IE, actually owns an old mac): Is it just an editor? Can you post a screenshot?

Re:LEAP

[TheAJofOZ]

Sigh, sadly it has fallen into the main problem with OpenSource on Mac OS 9 - lack of a standard compiler. The project uses CodeWarrior by the look of it and importing into ProjectBuilder doesn't seem to be working.

Anyone got CodeWarrior and able to post an actual built copy somewhere? That or know how to build the thing with gcc....

Re:LEAP

[Anonymous Coward]

i set it up last night on OS 9 and it was very interesting... different, but somewhat cool. haven't gotten used to it yet. but basically, its an editor on crack. i like vi better, because its simple and you can do the same stuff (like forward and reverse searching and stuff).

The Relevant Links

[TheRIAAMustDie]

Bug List A list of bugs in THE that need to be fixed. When all astrixed items are completed we will make our first release.

External Technical Spec Before going on to the design of the visually-oriented zooming portion of The Humane Environment (THE), it seems wise to specify the low-level interactions that take place within the document-centric portion. Also, this portion allows interaction by the visually impaired. We specify first that software necessary to demonstrate LEAP and some of the selection and command interface techniques and other benefits described in "The Humane Interface" [Raskin, 2000]. THE is intended to run on at least Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms. This specification describes the first portions to be implemented and gives some indications for future directions.

Joining the THE Team This is an unusual open-source project in that we are exploring a user interface and programming environment that is quite different than current practice. This document explains where to begin to become a contributer.

Manual The user manual, written for developers of the Humane Environment

Mission Statement To make computer technology available to a wider audience than has been possible by radically and rationally improving its usability.

Using CVS and Sourceforge.net This guide should get you a copy of the Humane Environment in its development incarnation. It is not quite ready for general user application. When it is, we will set up a simple, straightforward download.

Peace Out

Accessibility

[jim3e8]

I admire what this guy is doing (I have his book, in fact) but if one of the project goals is to aid the visually-impaired, he should probably extend that to include his website. By this I mean a CSS-based rather than table-oriented layout, not embedding tags inside table cells, and so on. These things make a web site more accessible to all. Now, off to download the project.

Interesting, but....

[freeze128]

I would like to see a screenshot of why this interface is so different, but there doesn't seem to be one on the website. I also wish there were a PC version, or at least some sore of interactive demo.

It makes me wonder.... Is this the same guy who thought all files should be arranged by association, instead of in a tree structure? That would just make things SLOPPY. I sure hope this Humane interface doesn't promote sloppiness!

Re:Interesting, but....

[William Tanksley]

I would like to see a screenshot of why this interface is so different

I agree.

It makes me wonder.... Is this the same guy who thought all files should be arranged by association, instead of in a tree structure?

Er... I think so, but didn't you know that association is a graph structure, and graphs can be displayed as trees (minimal spanning tree)?

That would just make things SLOPPY.

It could, yes. Just like the current system can make things sloppy -- but unlike the current system, it's actually directly useful for the way things need to be done. Folders and files aren't enough; we need links as well, and links need an entirely different toolset to play with.

With an associative filesystem, you only need files and categories. Only two concepts, not three.

I sure hope this Humane interface doesn't promote sloppiness!

Read the manual -- it will allow more sloppiness than the traditional system, but will do so by providing more power. For example, all documents written in it appear as a continuous chain, always apparently open.

-Billy

Re:Interesting, but....

[swbozo]

It makes me wonder.... Is this the same guy who thought all files should be arranged by association, instead of in a tree structure? That would just make things SLOPPY. I sure hope this Humane interface doesn't promote sloppiness!

"Association" doesn't have to mean "sloppiness." In fact, Hans Reiser, who designed the reiserfs filesystem, wrote an interesting paper which describes some of the virtues of associative organization of namespaces, as opposed to the traditional hierarchical organization (e.g. the Unix filesystem.)

Reiser's paper is very interesting, and IMO fits quite nicely with The Humane Environment's "no applications" paradigm. The focus then becomes the data (the stuff inside of documents), instead of the data access mechanism (applications manipulating documents.)

VIM, Emacs?

[theolein]

After having browsed through the manual, I can say that I've seen Ideas like this before that I use every day: It's called VIM.

Re:VIM, Emacs?

[drivers]

WRONG. Vim is modal. It is completely unlike THE. Emacs on the other hand...

Re:VIM, Emacs?

[greenrd]

Emacs seems pretty modal to me.

Case in point, a UI flaw I've encountered several times in student labs:

C-x C-o

BEEP Minibuffer already active

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP Minibuffer already active you idiot!

Oops. ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC damnit. Hit ESC too many times. Now I have to ESC to ESC out of the ESC...

Not exactly what I'd call user friendly, that.

Re:VIM, Emacs?

[commodoresloat]

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP Minibuffer already active you idiot!

Is that when it ate your homework?

Re:VIM, Emacs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that when it ate your homework?

It was.

And it was a really good homework.

Re:VIM, Emacs?

[AnEmbodiedMind]

Yeah, Defn. modal... BTW, when you get stuck in that damb minibuffer active thing, press C-g rather then ESC.

Re:VIM, Emacs?

[drivers]

Interesting. I don't use emacs so I wasn't aware of the modal behavior. It is less modal than vi though. (BTW, Hey greenrd, nice seeing a familiar k5 "face" on slashdot... I enjoy your articles and comments since I tend to agree with your political positions.)

Re:VIM, Emacs?

[jerde]

Bummer.

Re:BUSH on Vacation AGAIN !!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be lazy too if I was president for life. I can't wait until the real man in charge, Dickie, gets his war on in 2008, then we can take the battle to Eurasia and kick those motherfuckers all over.

go war

Maybe they should have started with mac CVS...

[Queuetue]

I'm reading the THE cvs instructions.

It's about seven pages of instructions - how to get enough tools, set enough settings and click enough icons and buttons and fields to get a mac to "cvs co" the source.

Strangely enough, I consider the two lines of CLI required much more humane.

cvs -d :pserver:user@server:path co
cvs -d :pserver:user@server:path checkout module

If this group is trying to make python programming easier, bless them and godspeed, but I'll stick to emacs, which only had one day of learning curve, not endless years of clickity-click curve.

Re:Maybe they should have started with mac CVS...

[Queuetue]

And of course, I flubbed that first command. :)

Re:Maybe they should have started with mac CVS...

[TheAJofOZ]

Just for the record, the instructions are for OS 9 or optionally OS X. You can of course use a corrected version of you cvs commands to check out the source on OS X assuming you installed the developer tools.

CVS was designed for UNIX/CLI and then ported/hacked to work elsewhere so it is obviously going to be difficult to setup and use.

Re:Maybe they should have started with mac CVS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Vi is much better than emacs... and its learning curve is not as great as you might think.

Well, at least you don't use Word... although emacs will is fast catching up with that program's bloat...

Re:Maybe they should have started with mac CVS...

[Rewd]

Try this:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.humane.sourceforge.net:/c vsroot/humane login

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.humane.sourceforge.net:/c vsroot/humane co HumaneEditorProject

Note that slashdot breaks up big lines .. so replace "/c vsroot" with "/cvsroot"

Correction

[Gropo]

His name is spelled "Jef Raskin", one "f" - and yes that is ironically an unintuitive, constantly botched way to spell the name...

Re:BUSH on Vacation AGAIN !!

[Anonymous Coward]

We're going to war with Mexico too? Yeah, baby! I'm gonna get me one of those senoritas as a house pet.

Yeah, that's why I insisted on having. . .

[kfg]

a steering wheel and gas pedal installed on my motorcycle.

Having to learn a new interface was just wasted time.

Next I'm going to have them installed on my VCR so I can set the clock without having to learn another interface. If we'd just standardize on a one interface for everything than life would be a lot easier, everyone would know how to work everything and we wouldn't have to waste time learning new shit all the time.

As a matter of fact I'm still kinda pissed at all that time I spent learning how to read ( and as you can tell I've simply refused to learn how to spell). We should be able to do it by direct neural interface.

With a steering wheel and gas pedal.

KFG

Like a dog returning to its own....

[Stonent1]

GETTING STARTED WITH A NEW DOCUMENT IN THIS EARLY VERSION

When you double click on the Humane Editor icon to launch it...

Already returning to your roots, I see.

waste of time right now

[zephc]

Maybe after it's out of alpha it might be worth something... but not yet (wouldn't run correctly under OS X Classic for me)

Economic times dictate needs....

[Cyberia]

Great! This is more like it!

A place to drop off your un-wanted and abused engineers! (Just put them in the cage, and don't forget to donate some money to feed them... while they await adoption)

I wanted to work on this so bad...

[drivers]

And I was so psyched when I found out they were making it open source... unfortunately it's only for MacOS and CodeWarrior at that. Any questions I had about which files to compile into what projects were unanswered and I gave up a long time ago.

OT: The SourceForge blog?

[The Bungi]

Now, this is interesting (and completely unrelated to the article, but still). Is doing a website like that on SF a violation of their terms? After all, it's about 1/5th software development there.

Seems to me that's a cheap and unslashdottable way to get a homepage!

Re:OT: The SourceForge blog?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hadn't noticed, but yeah--you're right. He's really stretching the hospitality of sourceforge.

Re:OT: The SourceForge blog?

[mns]

It's really typical of Raskin. It seems there's very little information about THE and mucho info about Raskin's personal views on *.

Wait 'til he gets around to adding the "I created everything" documentation archives. It's amazing he gets any coding done at all with all the grandstanding he does. Oh wait, THE is Python + a "word processor"... I guess he doesn't get any coding done after all...

Re:you mother

[susano_otter]

Yeah, Stile was arguably "cool", back when he was posting some kind of fucked-up blog. Now that his site is nothing more than an extended banner ad for various pay-for porn sites, the pitiful remains of his "coolness" pale in comparison to The Hun.

Re:BUSH on Vacation AGAIN !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Im gonna buy me a big plot of land on Bali once we napalm those savage towel-headed gooks off of it.

Long live Bush and his global campaign of Christian Freedom!

why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyway?

[josephgrossberg]

The case for using an IDE when you're doing C, C++, Java, C#, etc. has already been made.

But why use an IDE for something like Python or Perl, when there is no manual compile-link-execute cycle? Is tab-completion of methods that compelling? What are people's experiences with this?

(I use emacs to code Python on Linux, and Textpad to do it on Windows. I also own copies of Komodo and ActiveState's Visual Python for Visual Studio .NET, but haven't gotten much use out of either.)

vi everywhere

[PotatoMan]

When I read the THE manual, I couldn't help but feel he was reinventing the vi command set and using it as the main interface to the system.

But, since Jef is a bright guy, I'm going to wait and see where he's going with this. The THE editor is just a single example of what's in his head. I think it's a mistake to generalize from this example to the entire THE system.

Also, perhaps what's going on is that a fellow who spent his life thinking about how ordinary people use computers has simply found a systematic explanation for why vi is still so popular (although I'm an Emacs user myself).

The vi command set was designed to minimize the number of characters sent and recieved by the relatively slow terminals used at the time. Perhaps it also encapsulates a 'minimum effort/maximum result' way of thinking. In which case, it's no surprise that Jef would rediscover it.

Woah!

[A_Non_Moose]

Skim thru the manual a little bit, and next time someone bitches about vi being difficult show them this.

Oye, veigh.

Re:Woah!

[jacobcaz]

I especially like this excerpt from the manual. Seems like an ineffective way to communicate key-presses:

USING THE KEYBOARD

To make keyboard operations clear without having to write something like, "in order to type a capital 'A' press and hold the shift key while typing the letter 'a' ", we use a simple shorthand. A backslash after a key name (\) indicates a key going down, and the slash (/) indicates a key going up. Thus, the normal way to type a capital "A", is to perform this sequence of actions:

Shift \ a \ a / Shift /

Inside this notation we do not use quotes around the names of keys, and individual letters always appear in lower case. In the manual we will not need to use either slash in our examples, so there will be no ambiguity.

Re:Woah!

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I especially like this excerpt from the manual. Seems like an ineffective way to communicate key-presses...

God forbid they should use any *graphics* to clarify things!

I can't believe this is the same guy that wrote the eminently usable Apple II manual.

Re:Woah!

[qengho]

Seems like an ineffective way to communicate key-presses

In his book he uses up- and down-arrow graphics to indicate keypresses. It's actually pretty obvious. Since arrows are not standard ASCII, slashes are a decent solution for plaintext.

Recursive

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the word you're looking for is...

Re:Recursive

[Anonymous Coward]

See here.

Recursive

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the word you're looking for is....

One quick argument...

[digerata]

This is from the review by Justin Hollands on his website. I have to disagree here.

Let's discuss some examples. One of Raskin's ideas is that we use the same core set of elementary operations for many purposes (one might say across applications). Such operations include: selection, indication, activation, moving, and copying. If we use the same small set of operations across applications, we can learn a keyboard shortcut or have special purpose keys for each, rather than look them up via menu selection using a pointing device. Why do we have all these special-purpose menu items peppering the top of our displays? Raskin argues that they are unnecessary. In a mistaken attempt to provide us with lots of functionality (feature bloat), designers have cobbled together the elementary operations as menu items. But if the elementary operations are well learned, then a rapid series of command keystrokes will be faster than the menu look up and selection.

Revolutionary, right?

Right off the bat, I think of both Windows and Mac (not a GUI linux user) and how they already have much of this built in. On windows, ctrl-x,c,v cut copy and paste respectively. The equivalent in mac os, I believe, is command-x,c,v. Now there are many more like this such as ctrl-a for selecting all items. And the shortcuts work in Word, Explorer, EditPlus, Photoshop, etc. As long as the developer(s) of the application follow the standard, they are available. So that is where this argument is moot. Its not a new idea but one that has been implemented sporadically across applications.

Also, many would agree that the concept of keyboard shortcuts is only awakened in the advanced user. A person that is new to the computer is going to rely almost exlusively on the mouse. Point 'n Click, right? Creating a standard set of keyboard shortcuts (even when there already is an unwritten standard) will not help the beginning computer user.

I don't know, I'm still going to read the book though.

Like the definition of recursion...

[Codex The Sloth]

recursion
\Re*cur"sion\ (-sh?n), n.

See recursion.

Re:Like the definition of recursion...

[iJed]

To know recursion you must first know recursion. :-)

Don't know where I first heard this but after doing a functional programming module I've found it to be perfectly true!

Re:Like the definition of recursion...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my goodness...

You just put half the slashdot readers into an infinite loop! They will be stuck on that comment for weeks. :op

The Humane Editor

[Anonymous Coward]

Is called nano

Installation for mandrake users
$ su -c "rpm -e vim && urpmi nano" && nano

Re:Well, considering it runs on OS X,

[MamasGun]

Lightweight xNIX-like OS for Macs over here: http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/. Moof!

Humane?

[Spudley]

If we want to start being humane to our development environments, I can think of a few that need to be put out of their misery.

Oh, and will you look at that - an ad for Visual Studio at the top of this article! How ironic.

TECO

[jasonditz]

I henceforth demand that TECO rename itself The Inhumane Enivornment

Join me or die, can you do any less?

RASKIN is a fool. He actively FOUGHT the mouse!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

RASKIN is a fool. He actively FOUGHT the mouse at apple and got into arguments over it.

Its all in the oldest books on the Macintosh origin.

The Lisa was running in Sept 1982 and had a mouse, but the astounding lower cost Macintosh shipped at the end of 1983... also with a mouse in the box.

But RASKIN hated the mouse so much that after he quit apple soon after, he bragged that his next project to work on was a word processor machine with no mouse, not even an option, and no GUI to support one ever!

Raskin is a fraud and a liar who is trying to rewrite history and pretend that he supported GUIs and mice... in fact he was strongly against the mouse and was a typical anti-GUI bigot.

Sure, his signature is embedded in the case of the amazing mac, along with countless other cool dudes, and I am not saying Raskin was not skilled.... I am saying he was anti progress and anti-GUI.

He was collosally wrong and the only mac engineer to be anti-macintosh.

Re:RASKIN is a fool. He actively FOUGHT the mouse!

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically the public could not officially buy a mac until the beginning of january 1984, but television commercials were shown in 1983 (to allow Cleo awards), and I and many others used them in late 1983.

Yes, it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

But with cool name and TM, and we all know buzzwords make software better. Imagine it, "Licensed LEAP(TM) technology!" :)

What's Old is New Again

[ratboy666]

Dear Jef:

You have just re-invented vi -- perhaps vim! Except that your approach takes more keystrokes, and isn't quite as fast.

Shift-space: The shift and space are NOT next to each other on most keyboards, but are on others. Also, the Shift space sequence tends to be a TWO hand operation (I've asked people to try it -- for righties, its left pinky shift, right thumb space -- if they were touch typists; there are other variants).

Now, the ESC key is nasty in vi -- generally, uppermost left key, but it also creeps on the keyboard. I have to think about mapping it somewhere else! Still -- LEAP in vi is:

/ return

with, of course, an added leading ESC if I were typing. Back leaps use ? instead of /.

Repeat the leap? / return. Repeat an editing operation? . return. Etc.

No menus, no GUI, no muss, no fuss.

Graft on your extensions into VI or EMACS please. [ps. I can't use EMACS - it makes my hands hurt. Really.]. Good old home row visual editing. Stick some smarts in there, and shoot for the stars.

But... this isn't new. Not even that interesting. I expected more, Jef.

Ratboy

Re:What's Old is New Again

[benja]

Um, let me get this straight. You are saying that vi is not a modal interface?

Re:What's Old is New Again

[jtdubs]

FYI, repeating a search in VI could easier be done by pressing 'n' from command-mode. 'n' moves forward to the next search result and 'N' moves backwards.

If the original search was using ? rather than /, than 'n' is the next search result, moving up the page, and 'N' is the next search result moving down the page.

This saves the Enter key pressing and is faster to press than / for most people.

Justin Dubs

Re:What's Old is New Again

[Anonymous Coward]

why is shift-space any better than just using ctrl? are there *that* many times where a user actually wants to type a ctrl character?

maybe i like using a scrollbar once in a while!

there is nothing groundbreaking here. this project sucks.

Re:What's Old is New Again

[Anonymous Coward]

Oy! Jef is not about typing speed. C require the least amount of characters to get things done, but it doesn't mean it is the fastest to program in. Same thing with typing. The typing and meta mode transition is annoying in vi as it is not visually apparent, so Jef is using the least amount of keystoke to indicate a mode change.

As for shift-space, yes it requires two hands, guess what, it is faster and less stressful to type with two hand, no wonder your hands hurt.

Re:you mother

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree. Stile has been going downhill for a long time now. His rants are just excuses to post links to pay sites.

Recursive

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the word you're looking for is.....

Funny you should mention that...

[Doubting Thomas]

Perhaps it escaped your attention that the motorcycle user interface is modeled closely after the horse user interface?

At the time, the car was the disruptive interface change.

Re:Funny you should mention that...

[RevDobbs]

Oh thats right, I had forgotten that little tid bit about twisting the right ear to go faster, and that the clutch is worked with the left ear.

Thank god all the Japanese horse manufacturers have standardized their interfaces; sure, Harelys are still a bit different, but why would anyone interested in actual performance want an air-cooled V-twin horse anyway?

Re:Funny you should mention that...

[Anonymous Coward]

why would anyone interested in actual performance want an air-cooled V-twin horse anyway

Female passengers like the vibration...

HERE'S ANOTHER SCREENSHOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello this is some text.

This is another paragraph!
I didn't mean to type that!
LEAP FORWARD

No Thanks

[SlipJig]

After a quick read through the manual I'm left unconvinced - it really only addresses text editing, and to me it doesn't sound easier even for that. I'm pretty good with a mouse - the only thing I want is for keyboard makers to put the numeric keypad and other junk on the left so the mouse is closer to my right hand.

Don't get me wrong - I'm perfectly willing to relearn my work habits for the sake of efficiency (see my sig), but so far this guy hasn't convinced me he's onto anything revolutionary.

This just goes to show....

[Tony]

Those who do not understand EMACS are doomed to re-invent it, poorly.

Informative??!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha! Read the post then score it "funny" please. kthxbye

Re:Informative??!!

[wirelessbuzzers]

Are you sure he shouldn't be moderated "redundant" ?

I'm anti-mouse too

[commodoresloat]

Those things will wreak havoc on your system, chewing through electrical wires, not to mention they crap everywhere.

Jef Raskin Doesn't Get It

[JavaJoint]

I'll tell ya a Jef Raskin story.

Sometime in the 1980's - West Coast Computer Faire...

Jef is on a panel, and the talk is about UI, or the
future of computing, or some such.

Jef states that he doesn't see the need for User Groups.
He doesn't like the idea that people that own computers
get together to help each other out.

He said "You don't see Washing Machine User Groups". He may have mentioned the toaster as well.

To this day, I felt he misses a fundamental point:

You don't do your taxes on a washing machine.

You don't write books with your toaster.

A lot of what we do with computers (some of us,
anyways...) is inherently cerebral, and social.

OF COURSE we are going to get together to
talk about them, in person or online.

You can dumb down a UI as much as you want,
hide as many details as possible, in an attempt
to spoon feed the masses of the Blinking Twelve.
But the fact remains: if there's some thinking
involved with the task at hand, users will want to
get together to share experiences.

So Jef, take back the example about the Washing Machine :-)

Re:Jef Raskin Doesn't Get It

[firewrought]

Raskin understands one thing: flow. His suggestions in The Humane Interface all seek to hone the "flow" experience of the user. Truth be told, it would be nice if programmers (and website designers) thought more about this: many programs could benefit from eliminating unneccessary modes and superflous steps (like those obnoxious websites that force you to choose a country on the first page before proceeding).

However, Raskin often overemphasizes this aspect of the user experience. For instance, Raskin suggests giving the user a system-assigned PIN instead of a username/password combination. That way, a user logging into a system only has to type in one piece of information (the PIN) instead of two pieces (username and password). If done correctly, this would probably be more secure and ease the flow of the user's experinece.... except (and this point eludes him) this approach becomes a pain in the neck when you have multiple systems: most users would prefer to choose their own password at the trivial price of having to enter both their ID and password.

Another intresting but flawed idea of Raskin's is to create a standard series of cables that have uni-sex coupling adapters. It's a neat concept... you'd be able to plug any two cables together (provided they were of the same gauge) without the need for painful adapters, couplers, etc. Again, Raskin's ideas would involve a usability trade-off (that he doesn't see): it's easier to assemble all those wires leading into the back of your computer when each wire can only plug into a limited number of places. Think about how much trouble all those 3.5 jacks on the back of your soundcard give you when you don't have adequate lighting...

To be fair to Raskin, he some great ideas that counterbalance the often shoddy ideas of us programmers (like those funky number prompts in Blender where you click on the [unmarked] left side of the button to decrement and the [unmarked] right side to increment... WTF?). He is worth reading just for the challenge of embracing new ideas. Too, many times Raskin has a great point to make, but he expresses it in a way that makes him easily misunderstandable (e.g., "you don't need an operating system"). For a more balanced read, I suggest the authorative and entertaining The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, but Raskin is more revolutionary. I'm glad that some of his ideas are being realized in a real world environment where they can be modified and built-on.

Re:Jef Raskin Doesn't Get It

[Anonymous Coward]

Raskin suggests giving the user a system-assigned PIN instead of a username/password combination. That way, a user logging into a system only has to type in one piece of information (the PIN) instead of two pieces (username and password). If done correctly, this would probably be more secure and ease the flow of the user's experience.

That approach works pretty well until you try to create a new PIN and the system tells you "already in use." Congratulations, you've just gained access to somebody else's account!

Re:Jef Raskin Doesn't Get It

[qengho]

Jef states that he doesn't see the need for User Groups. He doesn't like the idea that people that own computers get together to help each other out.

I wasn't at the conference, but I'm guessing what he meant was that there shouldn't be a need for user groups. The ideal interface would be so straightforward that consultation with others won't be required, at least for normal operations. Possibly an unattainable goal, but certainly a worthy one.

Re:Jef Raskin Doesn't Get It

[firewrought]

Jef's system is equivalently secure... the system assigns the PIN. And the minimum password length is increased.

Suppose as an example you have a system with a 1000 users. If users randomly pick passwords from the set of [a-z0-9]{6}, you can get equivalent security by assigning them PINs from [a-z0-9]{8} (because there are 2^36 == 1296 > 1000 combinations). Sociologically it can be more or less secure: users can't pick an obvious PIN when these things are assigned by the system, but they will be more tempted to write these PINs down in a readily accessible place.

Overall, though, it just a bad idea to confuse one's identity with an authorization secret, except in cute cases like supermarket cash-registers.

The savings to the user is imaginary though (he/she has to remember passwords which are longer, less meaningful, and not reusable on other PIN-based systems).

whoopdy fucking do

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another text editor. It's not like there aren't 40028829 of them already. Give me a fucking break. This doesn't deserve to be posted on the front page anymore than an article that discussed the size of cowboy neals cock.

Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw

[geek]

In python it's nice because of the forced syntax, IDE's can remove some of the fuss for you by auto indenting etc.

My perl scripts are always so short that it's faster and easier to just start up vi in a working terminal than to load any IDE.

Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw

[otisg]

Why use Textpad on Winblows and Emacs on Linux?
You can use Emacs under Winblows, too.
I use XEmacs on both Linux and Winblows.

Yet another lunatic

[Anonymous Coward]

To me this old man appears to be a lunatic, wacko crackpot like RMS. I heard he was against computer related user groups in general.

People who don't have the ability to learn VIM find themselves using Emacs.

Software Industry Innately (Too) Conservative

[reallocate]

>> ...build on small things that already exist right now. Maybe change some major things, but keep the tried and true methods.

This is one big reason why the software industry is so innately conservative, all the media hype about the pace of change notwithstanding.

Developers, especially open source developers who are free of the need to sell familiar products into an established pool of customers, ought to avoid underestimating the abilities of users to comprehend and absorb change. After all, somone had to be the first to try one of those "tried and true methods".

Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw

[JudasBlue]

There are a couple of things that could be handy with a python IDE. Visual class browsers come to mind as something I have use for on bigger projects. I use a Tk based class browser I cobbled together for myself, but I gather many py ide's have this feature.

The other would be a Tkinter visual interface builder. I don't think that any of the current IDE's have this, and THAT would get me to start using them. I can code Tkinter manually, but for rapid small prototyping, I could find this feature strong. The swing interface builder is one of the things I really used the most in JBuilder when I did a lot of Java codiing.

And if they want me to get really excited, adding a WxWindows interface builder on top of that.

And, heck, while we are at it, throw in some automated packaging tools. Not that it is very hard to package stuff for Python, but it I can see where it would save me some time over doing it manually.

Troll Troll Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Bastage

OT: Escape key in vi

[jjc2222]

Now, the ESC key is nasty in vi -- generally, uppermost left key, but it also creeps on the keyboard.

FYI, you can use C-[ (Control-Open Bracket) instead of the Escape key. I find this infinitely easier, especially on a Sun keyboard (with Ctrl to the left of the 'a').

Re:OT: Escape key in vi

[Cryptnotic]

Of course, if you're using a Sun keyboard, you have the Esc to the left of the 1 (just above Tab), so it isn't nearly as difficult to reach as it is on a normal PC keyboard.

Google: Assocation not Hierarchy

[2nd Post!]

Google is an interface that seems to imply files and data are arranged via association; that's how Google collects and maintains ranks, isn't it?

Ironic, isn't it...

[wirelessbuzzers]

... that some of his keystroke series in THE are significantly more awkward on a dvorak keyboard... ... which *is* significantly faster, trust me, if you have the time to learn it... ... which is about what he claims that THE is...

I think I'll just stick with my odd blend of CLI and GUI (called MacOS X) and my dvorak keyboard. At least I can customize the bindings in emacs.

( \begin{rant}[parenthetical]

Why doesn't everyone use these? At least the dvorak keyboard? If computers came with them instead of QWERTY at least as a standard option, kids would be able to learn to type this way and wouldn't even have to relearn. Seems like it would offer a greater improvement in speed than THE could.

\end{rant} )

Re:Ironic, isn't it...

[Anonymous Coward]

A Dvorak keyboard attached to a Mac, that's good. Please tell me you're an EMACS freak; we'll call it a hat trick of preaching pointless incompatibility and I can die happy.

Re:Ironic, isn't it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, there's no evidence that Dvorak is faster. You may like it better -- and more power to you -- but it has never been shown to have any general purpose advantages over QWERTY.

Re:Ironic, isn't it...

[teridon]

Just out of curiousity, what happens when you sit down at someone else's computer, and they don't have a dvorak layout? How long does it take you to "remember" your QWERTY ...origins?

Re:Ironic, isn't it...

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>what happens when you sit down at someone else's computer, and they don't have a dvorak layout?

Assuming it's a Mac, it's not a problem - I just open the "Keyboard" control panel & select "dq".

Re:Ironic, isn't it...

[wirelessbuzzers]

Not too long, I can touchtype on QWERTY. I couldn't for a while after I switched, but recently I've been using other people's computers a lot and have had to be able to touchtype. This is for minor stuff though, browsing the internet.

If I have to write a paper on someone else's computer, I just switch it. Basically every computer has it, it's been in Mac OS since at least system 7 if not earlier, on all major Unices in the last few years, and in Windows since 3.1. 95 was a bit of a pain, with the whole "insert install CD" thing, but the more recent ones have it in there by default.

Re:Ironic, isn't it...

[wirelessbuzzers]

Unfortunately, you are half-right. Your typing speed depends mostly on how much you type rather than what keyboard you use. Furthermore, this is not the sort of question that you can do a controlled double-blind study on. Almost every study to test the effectiveness of Dvorak has been seriously flawed or biased in one way or another. I myself am not that much faster at typing on Dvorak than I was on QWERTY, and I would probably be just as fast if I had spent my time improving my QWERTY typing speed rather than learning Dvorak. While it took me much less time to get up to speed in Dvorak, this could be because I already knew how to type when learning it.

However, what I have noticed is that it is substantially less tiring to type on a Dvorak keyboard than on a QWERTY one, and this is mostly because my hands don't have to move as far. Of course, my fingers have to strike just as many keys either way, so it won't prevent carpal tunnel either (although the fact that I'm using a split keyboard might help).

At least in my experience, the Dvorak keyboard is marginally better than the QWERTY one in terms of speed, and moderately better in terms of ergonomics. It probably isn't worth relearning for a programmer anyway, because it's optimized for English, not C++ (perl maybe?) and because as another poster pointed out, typing speed isn't the limiting factor in programming.

The article is about an incremental improvement to typing interface, and I thought it ironic that it was incompatible with another incremental improvement.

Re:Ironic, isn't it...

[qux.net]

I've heard it depends on the person. Personally I've sat down at a machine to work on it (standard QWERTY) with my laptop sitting next to it (Dvorak) switching between them every couple minutes while debugging, and not even noticed I was switching until about a half hour later (when I was interrupted by someone). It seems easier with different styles of keyboards, the difference becoming subconcious. Even if I do get confused for a second, usually it's a couple keystrokes and then I realise and just start using the other layout right away without having to think about it.

Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw

[Anonymous Coward]

Directory tree view of all the files in the project adjacent to the editor window and CVS integration are two big selling points for an IDE over a regular text editor.

Also, I often have a Makefile with Python projects to automate installation and testing. eg. for a CGI project I use a Makefile to put the Python code into cgi-bin and the HTML into the document root directory of my web server.

I'm talking about projects with often > 100 source files that are not manageable using VIM, which I use for everything else because I can't seem to remember all the Emacs key bindings.

Anyway, it's nice to be able to click the 'Build' button in my IDE (Project Builder) and have everything installed in the right place and ready to go.

Emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

To hell with this what we really need is emacs on the OS/X and emacs with python! I mean emacs works great for C/c++ lisp and even scheme, but for python it sucks. Now Im not much of a python man most of what Ive been doing recently is in lisp and scheme but python support for emacs is lacking.

No

[Hanji]

He's not saying vi is not modal, he's just pointing out that it (and Emacs) have had functionality very similar very similar to this "LEAP" except with easier ways of accessing them (I don't care what anyone says, Shift-{space '>} is harder than ESC / > return i or C-s >).

Re:RASKIN is a fool. He actively FOUGHT the mouse!

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole thing sounds familiar somehow. Oh! I know! The Lucid Emacs fork!

Is it cumbersome? Is it counterintuitive? Is it everything the voices in his head always dreamed about?

Emacs minus the legacy software and the enthusiastic user base. Free software fills yet another need. Yawn.

Ctrl + Z,X,C,V,A is all I need

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is already a consistent convention for most useful operations on most modern operating systems and across applicarions. For example, in all versions of windows and 99.99999% of windows apps you can do the following:

Ctrl-A selects all
Ctrl-Z undo last operation
Ctrl-X cut
Ctrl-C copy
Ctrl-V paste

And of course there are the OS-specific ones, like in windows you can do:

Windows-R to get a command line
Windows-E to open the windows explorer

So, what am I missing here? I don't see anything revoutionary or different about "THE". And I still think that for 99% of users the mouse is a better alternative than keyboard shortcuts.

I still don't get it

[gerardrj]

Okay, so he had one hit with the Mac GUI. But this thing (as many others have mentioned) has already been done in stuff like EMACS and VI*.

I recall seeing Jef on TechTV talking about how the computer should be intuative and non modal, so that it knew (for example) that when you started typeing something like "2 * 5 = 10" that instead of putting the numbers in the text window, it would pop up a window with the mathmatical answer, since you obviously wanted to perform a calculation and you would not have to go off and start some calculator application to get your answer.
MY question is "What makes that the obvious context"? What about a teacher typing out a math test? You would somehow have to tell the GUI to turn off the auto context switching while you typed out the formule for the test. This in the end seems even more obtuse a mechnism than the relatively common sense method of context/application switching we perform now.

After all, you don't (generally) just randomly change topics in a converstation and expect your listeners to keep up. You provide transitions (context switching) when your topic will change, otherwise you'd sound like a babling phycopath. Ex: So Bob, how are the kids? What's the torque limit on the master link of the drive chain on a 1978 Suziki GS 750S? 1250 x 52 = www.mcparts.com Wow, pretty soon they'll be starting shool.

That doesn't happen in real life, and I don't see why (from what I've read and heard) anyone would expect (or even want) their computer to attempt to interpret that stream and do things with it. That may have been a chat room conversation, a search engine query, salary calculation for a new job, a URL to a web page to browse, and more of the chat room. In that, and the infinite number of other examples, what are the chances that the OS/GUI will correctly guess what context you are intending.

For my time, I much prefer knowing what context my GUI is in, and knowing that it will not switch unless I do something to directly change it. Any automatic method will undoutedly lead to more errors, lot work and time.

Re:I still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a green squiggly line (ala MS Word and clones) which when clicked (or a magic keypress), converts to the answer for you?

Simple huh.

Re:I still don't get it

[jcr]

Okay, so he had one hit with the Mac GUI.

Umm, NO. Raskin started the Mac project, but he is not due the credit for the GUI. The Mac GUI emerged after Raskin was off the project.

If you want to know what Raskin had in mind for the Mac, see the long-defunct "Canon Cat".

-jcr

Re:I still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

What about using the mechanism in MPW: you can enter an expression, hit enter, and the line is evaluated. If you simply press return, it is not evaluated. A better wasy of implementing this could be pressing a "start selection" key, type the expression, then press an "evaluate" key. After all, it is much easier for the programmer to figure out how to evaluate an expression if they know what the expression is. The user does not loose control while editing their document either.

MPW is Apple's development environment for Mac OS 9 and earlier. I suspect that you can use similar tricks in Emacs if you know how to use it and don't mind entering expressions in Lisp.

LEAP is from a Canon Cat computer designed by Jef

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who's commenting that LEAP is copy of what's available in vi or EMACS (poor or not), it's actually a left over from a Canon Cat computer that Raskin designed post Macintosh. That particular computer actually came with two LEAP keys under space bar. With common keyboards not having such specialized keys, Raskin's having to result in using key combinations that many are used to from vi and EMACS. You can see the keyboard layout here and then learn more about them by clicking on the keys. Raskin included some explaination of Cat in The Humane Interface.

virtual screens

[jbolden]

I'd say virtual terminals are a major innovation. 20 years ago your physical screen was all the real estate you had to use. Right now OSX and Windows don't ship with virtual terminal setups by default but they both support them and almost all the Unix window managers have the support built in.

User's groups

[jbolden]

And you do have user's groups for more complex things like golf clubs and tennis rackets (though they aren't called user's groups).

Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw

[the_2nd_coming]

speaking of VS.NET, I got it so as to be able to get the plug in for it, but I also do C++ code...man what a Pain in the ass it is to code in that Bloated POS. why don't they just have a basic workspace option for C++ and the ability to be promted to create an active project at compile time?

no, I don't want to make managed code, I just want to write a frigen program that does not rely on the .NET frame work and then if I want to, go on to make C# apps and crap.

and the UI BLOWS. I am glad I still have VS 6.

fairly useless

[gralem]

I must say, Jef Raskin is pretty puch the idiot of the 21st century. He hasn't stopped crying since Jobs got rid of his OS9 interface. A couple of things to note: THE software does *NOT* run in OSX. It only runs in OS9/Classic. Raskin hates OSX SOOOO MUCH that he wants to create this useless software to run in a dying OS just because he likes 9 better than X. And talk about user interface--it has 48-pixel icons. WOOO!

The entire site is about Jef, not THE software. It talks about what Jef thinks make some really cool esoteric software. And if the user interface is good enough, we should all spend WEEKS adjusting our computing habbits to how he wants us to use the computer. (this is all summarizing the main link in the article).

It's just amazing that Jef is the only one he thinks is qualified to determine EVERYONE's computer interface needs. Thanks Jef, no thanks. I saw the light the first time I used enlightenment. Any OS that can let the user decide every aspect of the interface--easily switching from enlightenment to KDE to gnome to anything--is FAR better than being told you know too much about computers and "you are in a worse position for learning it than a novice who has only to acquire new habits and has nothing to unlearn!" *I* decide.

---gralem

Re:fairly useless

[gralem]

Sorry, I meant 22nd century. I was the idiot of the 21st century.

Guess what - IBM, HP (Compaq) Selling LINUX PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM will soon join HP(Compaq) in selling Linux pre-loaded PCs in India.
For details, read the story on ZDNetIndia IBM mulls Linux for its PCs
Bill Gates needs a change of career or perhaps needs to move to India and become a monk ...

Dvorak is much better

[hackshack]

Just a general "hear, hear" in response to your comment about the Dvorak layout. A while ago there was a link on /. to a man who had developed a superior keyboard layout using a genetic algorithm and it turned out, after much optimization, exactly like Dvorak, save two keys that were switched with one another. I've been using Dvorak for years; took me about a week to learn, and while it's great for speed, it's far better for comfort IMHO. It's worthwhile for anyone who types more than 50 words a day. Note that it's optimized for English; however, I've found it to be much better than Dvorak in the few European foreign languages I've used so far (Spanish and French).

Re:Dvorak is much better

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is not whether the dvorak keyboard allows you to type faster-- clearly, it does. The question is whether most people would benefit from a faster typing speed.

I think writers would, and secretaries (although secretaries probably won't have to take dictation once voice recognition gets far enough along.) I bet that most programmers would see little, if any, increase in productivity, because typing speed is not a limiting factor in their work.

Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw

[H.G. Wells]

It's not the editing, it's the debugging that makes the difference with IDEs. Generally speaking I find it much quicker and easier to inspect my objects with mouse clicks rather than by typing commands or using print statements. (Though I will resort to the latter methods in some situations.)

Am I alone?

[umoto]

I've been writing software for most of my life, so I've logged a lot of hours typing on a keyboard. The observation I've made is that my hands are a lot more comfortable if I only have to push one key at a time and if I move my hands (not just my fingers) a lot.

Jef is advocating the use of shift-space to enter a special mode, then entering commands while still holding the shift key. All this is designed to keep the hands on home row. This seems awfully uncomfortable.

Not long ago the "happy hacker" keyboard came out. My boss got one. At that time I realized I may be one of the few geeks who prefers the ten cursor keys over vi/emacs key sequences. Am I alone? :-)

You're kind of missing Jef's point

[Jimithing DMB]

You say how Raskin is simply stating the obvious, yet still miss at least half of his point.

He's not /just/ saying you should have standard cut, copy, paste in all apps, what he is saying is that you should ONLY have cut, copy, and paste in apps unless you have a really good reason not to. In other words, resist the temptation to add hundreds of features for operations which can be done with a few basic building blocks.

At least that's what I got out of it.

Oh, and I'll tell you that at least on the Mac, keyboard shortcuts seem to make sense. Cmd-X,C,V (cut copy paste) A (select all) Z (undo) Q (Quit application W (close window). Q and W are very helpful. Putting cut copy and paste as shortcut keys is a good idea. They are all lined up on the keyboard, command is easy enough to thumb while hitting one of them (unlike that abomination that is the PC control key.. ack).

About Raskin and the MacOS...

[Gregg Williams]

FYI, Jef Raskin is not the "developer of the MacOS," or anything close to it. The only correct statement, carefully phrased so as to connote the most prestige, is the one that he always uses in biographical paragraphs, which usually says something to the effect that he was the creator of the Macintosh project. It is true that he started a project named Macintosh while at Apple, but the goal of this project was to create a very simple "information appliance," much like the Cannon Cat later became. At some point, Steve Jobs took over the project and changed it completely; the end result was what we now know as the first Macintosh computer.

As for my credentials in saying this, I was a senior editor at BYTE magazine during this time period and was told these facts by someone on the original Macintosh team. I later worked at Apple for ten years and never heard anyone there associate Raskin's name with the Macintosh computer.

Re:About Raskin and the MacOS...

[allanc]

Not only that, but he fought bitterly when Jobs turned the Macintosh into the computer that we know and/or love today. The "Macintosh" that Raskin wanted to build was basically an unexpandable Apple II with all of the software he thought you'd ever need built into the ROM. Think an Apple IIc, but much, much lamer.

There's certainly nothing of Raskin's in the current Mac line (except, of course, for the name), and even in that first Mac 128, Raskin's only real influence was the fact that you couldn't expand the thing worth a damn (although the Mac team went behind Jobs' back and made it upgradable to 512K if you were willing to do some soldering).

--AC

Re:About Raskin and the MacOS...

[xathenax]

My understanding is that Raskin was responsible for several important Macintosh decisions, including the one-button mouse, and a bitmap display with *square* pixels.

About Interfaces

[PotatoHead]

Here is my rant (diatribe?) about the subject.

An interface should be designed around the task. The nature of the task will dictate the various priorities inherent in a good interface for that particular task.

Interfaces do not replace education or training for the most part. Maybe some 'new user' features can help get one started, or perhaps remember what is almost forgotten, but that is it. Any continuing reliance on these features will cripple the interface for those who simply want to complete the task, and know how.

Most of the opinion I read has a lot to do with specific interface attributes and how well they address a particular task. Maybe the information content is good, or it does not take many keystrokes compared to another interface, or perhaps it might be easier to use or more intuitive than another interface.

The big question is about the value the interface brings in terms of workflow. Is there real value? Are choices clearly presented? Do those choices make sense? Is there any busy work? eg. "Operation successful, press ok to continue..."

Each of us have developed our own interface needs that are a direct function of the work we do. Since we are more different than we realize, a good interface will allow for this. A great one will encourage this while continuing to perform its basic function which is again, performing the task at hand in the most effective manner.

Because of these things, ease of use has little to do with the quality of the interface. In fact, ease of use will often simply mean not powerful or maybe limiting to those who clearly understand the task at hand and are simply interested in performing it.

This is not about the fewest mouse clicks or the least button presses or any other simple metric. It is about understanding the nature of the task being designed for and presenting viable choices to those performing the task in a way that adds value to the execution of the task.

That's really it. Everything else is just fluff once you get past new user issues.

Coupla examples:

The seemingly simple task of editing text.

I have used vi, emacs (a little), joe, edlin, notepad, textpad, nedit and many others on different platforms. Each of these applications have their own different interface. Does that mean we simply don't yet know how to best edit text, or is it that we know all about editing text, but prefer to do it in specific ways depending on the overall goal of the text editing session.

I suspect the former will never happen and the latter does because...

On slow text only connections, vi is fantastic. You can clearly delinate between command and data. Given latency issues and large text datasets, this seperation allows one to make best use of the connection they have. You can do powerful things with a few keystrokes. To someone on a lan who does not understand vi very well at all, this is cryptic for no reason. For someone on a slow connecion it is golden --and worth learning if you value your time.

Casual writing is best done in something like Open Office, or something similar. This type of interface scales to a degree also. Want to step up from a simple essay? There are features present that do not get in the way until you start looking for them. Got a slow connection? Forget it.

I happen to enjoy editing code in nedit or text pad. I am also not an expert coder. If that changes for me, I understand I will likely outgrow these two because they do not address more advanced coding tasks as well as some other programs do.

Since the various tasks surrounding the editing of text are very different, the best interfaces are going to be different even though all we are really doing is editing text.

This means there is never ever going to be the one best text editor. (Sorry vi -vs- emacs folks!)

What does this mean for those of us who want to edit some text?

It means that people who are serious about editing text are best served by learning about the different interfaces and how they relate to the task at hand if they want to make the best use of their time.

Casual text editor or writer? Great! Get one of the bloated hold your hand programs and make good use of it. That is what it is there for.

What does this mean for those who produce text editing tools?

It means there is a clear tradeoff between the number of tasks you address well and the value your interface provides to those who are interested in performing those tasks. Try and do too much? You get Word, or Open Office. Do too little and you get Notepad or Joe. Nail one task perfectly and you get Textpad or vi or emacs.

This also means that in order to create a good interface for a given task, you better damn well understand that particular task inside and out. If you don't, then you cannot add any value and your interface will suffer like it or not.

Are any of these editors really better than the others?

It depends on the nature of the task you use them for. The only one out of the bunch I could never understand is edlin. It does not do anything well at all. Mistake, glad to be rid of it. The other ones though all have their merits depending on what one is doing --more importantly why.

Dumbing down a program to attract new users because it is easier to use is simply trading one thing for another. In the end, what could make your program great is lost.

This is just as bad as an interface that assumes too much because it makes those that use it work harder than the need to in order to get the task done. Spartan is ok --given the task at hand would benefit from that.

People who design interfaces need to pay particular attention to their users and the nature of the task they are performing. It is about focus. Too narrow or too broad, or just right for what people really are going to be doing.

Anything else is a waste of time.

Re:About Interfaces

[bonaldi]

All I want in my perfect tool is always-visible wordcount. I'd prefer not to use a GUI for my editing although I would if I had to, but I'm a writer and I absolutely have to be able to see how many words I've done, and cute little dialogs or displaying the results of a count at a keypress just isn't enough.

The only editor I've ever seen that does this is Quark CopyDesk, and it is, as you'd expect from Quark, *shit*. InCopy is probably a lot better, but you can't buy it standalone, and I can't find any wareZ.

Re:About Interfaces

[PotatoHead]

You know that would be a nice feature. When I write short things, I find myself checking the wc often. Makes for a better piece the first pass through.

I have never used an editor that did this (that I know of). Best I have seen is a stats line with number of lines and bytes used. Useless for this sort of thing.

Raskin does the Canon Cat, again. Nobody cares.

[Animats]

Raskin has built this text editor several times before. The first implementation was on an Apple II, and his LEAP technology was first seen there. The best known implementation was the Canon Cat, which was a typewriter-like standalone word processor device. The Canon Cat came out in 1987, which was way too late to launch a "smart typewriter". It was on the market for about six months before Canon pulled it due to weak sales.

Raskin's critique of scrollbars for navigation makes some good points, but that was before mousewheel scrolling.

version fatigue

[hfastedge]

think it is time to get away from the notion of the user interface with no learning curve.

Well said. You know, for years now, we have been able to feel this affect on the members of our society that arent like us. We can feel the impatience of our busy soccer mom's who have no time but to drive their kids....to soccer, or talk on the phone to the other soccer moms. We all hate that companies market to impatience.

Now an example, Mp3.com, i like its free music, yet I've notice over my 3 years of using it, that every year or so, it changes its interface. This is too fool the dumbasses that mp3.com is working hard at its service. But its purely a graphical change, and in actuality, you have to relearn how to use it and look at it.

So we see here that the dumbasses at mp3.com's marketing scheme are marketing toward that impatient crowd of people that need to feel like their hand is being held, yet its interesting how at the same time, this has an anti effect, namely confusion.

Anyway, I believe that the solution is conservatism to all of this FUCKING HEADACHE of marketronism. But the funny thing is that american society is all but conservative. We're all about moving around....our techies are all about diversity...because we CAN make viral copies of software according to a copyleft, we WILL.

Because gentoo CAN exist on its own, instead of taking advantage of debian's system of developers and simply building on top of this... (eg, theres NOTHING stopping them from simply writing a pythonized version of apt that gets source (apt-get source)....

Anyway, this semi rant began because i was reminded of an article on version fatigue:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/20/122324 7

And I think that is also on the same lines as this and touches some different angles.

That Would Be HyperCard

[Anonymous Coward]

The trick is a user interface which grows in power as you learn how to use it, that is the real challenge

Never have I seen an interface for which this was more true than that of HyperCard.

What the other guy said, plus. . .

[kfg]

The early car interface was modeled on the bicycle interface, which, golly gee, ended up being the model for the motorcycle interface. Who woulda thunk it?

The bicycle interface, by the way, was modeled on the *boat* interface, not the horse.

KFG

Depends on the language used...

[Anonymous Coward]

The frequency at which different keys are hit depends on the language that you write in. Dvorak is not optimal for everything (e.g. frequencies of characters in Finnish is significantly different from English.). Then again most CLI interfaces are more or less based on English and the necessary non-alphabetic keys (./* etc.) have been picked for convenience on a US QWERTY keyboard. This can also be a bit of a pain, since for instance in commonly used Scandinavian QWERTYs you get from the same key; > with shift.

Re:Depends on the language used...

[wirelessbuzzers]

Right. Most stuff isn't that much worse, the main annoyance being that the control keys zxvc and qw arent all next to each other. But that doesn't matter too much anyway, just takes a couple days to get used to. All the shift-characters are above the same symbols, and nothing is much farther away than in QWERTY. The brackets are moved around a bit, but they aren't that much farther away (they're in the place of - and =). The common puncts (at least in English, less so in UNIX) are all closer.

The problems with THE were things like > not being directly above space so you have to move your hand more. Minor details, but so is THE in the first place.

Re: Your sig

[greenrd]

In Soviet Russia, Soviet Russia jokes were actually funny.

Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, just maybe, s/he prefers using Textpad to Emacs. I realise this is close to heresy but Emacs sucks ass.

The THE name is already taken by a text editor!

[leandrod]

THE has been for many years standing for The Hessling Editor, a POSIX clone of IBM XEdit, including Rexx scriptability.

Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw

[Anonymous Coward]

You should look at glade + pygtk + python (note there is no need for gnome stuff if not required).

An example is always best. FSlint is a project
constructed in glade, liblade, python 1.5 and gtk 1.2:.

pixelbeat

Sounds like a Microsoft Product

[Dragonfly]

Excellent point. We all see how well automatic context switching works for Microsoft products ("You appear to be writing a letter, would you like help?" "No, when I want help I'll ask for it!").

A Humane Interface is not one that requires you to keep dozens of commands in your head, it is one that allows direct manipulation of everything using controls with intuitively divined operation. If your interface isn't as easy to figure out as a hammer, keep working at it!

Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw

[josephgrossberg]

Haha no. I like them both.

The thing is, when using Windows I'm used to a particular set of keybindings (CTRL-V is paste, CTRL-Z is undo) across programs.

When I'm using Linux, I'm used to a different set of keybindings (CTRL-Y is paste, CTRL-_ is undo).

The point is, I don't want to *think* about what commands I'm typing; I just want it to come naturally. And I think mixing and matching the two concepts will create problems.

I already get enough annoyances from the fact CTRL-D adds a bookmark in Mozilla, instead of deleting a character. :)

LEAP (tm) is fundamentally broken!

[Rouven]

Contrary to the standard U.S. layout, on German, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and probably a couple dozen other keyboards, < and > are on the same key. Which means, since you have to hold down Shift to enter their "Humane Quasimode", you cannot leap backwards.

Dvorak didn't work for me

[GlenRaphael]

a dvorak keyboard... ... which *is* significantly faster, trust me, if you have the time to learn it...

I'm using Dvorak right now. It took a week to learn, a month to be comfortable with and another month - including many hours of use of a typing-tutor program - before I approached my QWERTY speed. And now that I've been using Dvorak for several months both at home and at work, I'm about ready to switch back.

Why? First off, I never saw any speed improvement at all. It subjectively feels a little better when I force myself to touch-type, but I'm still slower than I was before I made the switch. Secondly, there are occasions when I need to use a QWERTY keyboard. For instance, there are PDA keyboards that only come with that layout. Or internet kiosks when I travel. Thirdly, over the years I've learned many functional shortcuts based on the QWERTY layout that don't transfer well to Dvorak. Command-V to paste. Navigation using vi/vim keys. That sort of thing.

So it was an interesting experiment, but I'm not convinced that Dvorak is worth the effort and I expect I will switch back to QWERTY in the near future.

Well, how fast do you type?

[wirelessbuzzers]

It depends how much you type, and on what you type. I write papers more than I program; it's probably not much faster for programming. If you can already type 100 WPM and you're not a secretary, increasing your typing speed isn't important and to learn any new layout up to that speed would take far to much work to be worth it.

I thought that the change in command keys was a minor annoyance; I got used to changed commands quickly and remapped nav keys. And I don't use vim, mostly just stick with Mac text editors. As for speed, when I switched I could only type maybe 40 or 50 WPM anyway, so it didn't take all that much work to get faster than that. My papers in school were sufficient for this purpose. IM has also helped a lot.

The biggest change I've noticed is that it is less tiring to type quickly, because I don't have to move my hands as much, and many of the finger movements are much more natural (that, and I use a split keyboard, which lets me use a much more comforable posture). For example, nt and th (or nth) can be typed by rolling the right hand along the board. The force with which your hand has to strike the keys, however, is unchanged, so changing to Dvorak doesn't help all that much to prevent typing injuries.

Re:Well, how fast do you type?

[GlenRaphael]

I'm about 40 wpm on QWERTY, a bit less than that on Dvorak.

THE Is Not An Editor: An Explanation

[azaraskin]

"THE" stands for "The Humane Environment", a better and truly pleasant way for us to interact with a wide range of technology; from computers and PDAs to cell phones and other information appliances. The term "appliance" applies to all of these devices, from games to supercomputers.

THE is a nucleus to which commands are added. The commands are what you use to do tasks from checking email to rendering video frames. Superficially, this sounds like an operating system to which applications are added, but it is fundamentally different, especially from a human-centered point of view.

By adding individual commands rather than whole applications, which sometimes have hundreds or thousands of commands, you can install only what you need and understand. Companies that now make applications will also be able to sell commands or command sets using the same underlying engines that they currently offer. Because all commands are invoked in the same way (a property of the nucleus) there is a lot less for you to learn when you purchase new software. Commands never become invisibly hidden deep in a menu structure, and can be invoked at any time, just as in command-line systems -- but you never get locked into modes as in vi or emacs.

For complex tasks, complex software is often required. THE is not a "dumbed-down" system. If hundreds of commands are required for a specialized task, vendors will be able to provide that level of functionality. THE can handle any task that computers or information appliances can do at present. There is no loss of power or generality with THE compared to conventional systems; the only loss is in unnecessary complexity, size, cost, wasted time, frustration, and training -- just the things you want to lose.

These improvements are all made possible because in the two decades since the graphic user interface (GUI) was introduced there has been a great increase in our understanding of how people interact with technology. It would be wonderful if we could just tuck in a few loose ends and change a handful of details of present systems to have them work properly. Unfortunately, we have learned that the GUI concept has fundamental flaws that cannot be corrected by small changes. These flaws have to do with incompatibilities between the designs of both GUIs and command-line interfaces and the way our brains are wired. As we cannot change the way our minds work, we must change the interface design.

It was a careful and detailed study of ergonomics and cognitive psychology that led to the humane environment. The research background for THE, based on empirical studies by many scientists, is presented in Jef Raskin's book, "The Humane Interface".

THE's approach starts by streamlining the most common forms of interaction: use of the mouse and the creation and editing of text. These are tasks that you perform thousands of times; time and effort saved here benefits everything you do.

Because being able to work with text is so fundamental, and because most software is written with text, we have started by adding a set of word processing and programming commands to THE. Also, we have not yet released the specifications for the graphics elements of THE. This has led to some people thinking that THE is intended only as a hyper-efficient editor. Its scope is much wider.

--Aza Raskin (A THE Developer)

Re: :wq and :x

[some guy I know]

"ZZ" is faster than either of those methods.

hermos are nto freaks

[Anonymous Coward]

you wanna know helmlouth try being a hermo