I think you can get pretty close by investing a lot of time into configuring your perfect linux desktop, but hardly anyone is willing to do that as OSX or even Windows is good enough for most people.
Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
21–30 of 379 posts
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#22I recently got gifted an old Commodore PET. It boots straight into BASIC, so anything you type can be a command or a program, but what’s even cooler is the way the console (they call it “monitor”) works. If you press “up”, rather than scrolling through past commands one by one like in Bash, DOS etc. the cursor simply goes up the screen. You can modify anything you see and hit return to commit. This can be a previous…
Emacs’ Dired mode lets you interact with the file system this way. Imagine the output of ‘ls -l’ as an editable document — seeing this in action was one of the killer features that made me an Emacs user.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#23"UIs that are pretty and friendly are nice to have, but the true values of a good interface should be speed and efficiency to make their users as productive as possible."
Nonononononono! Both. I want both. The biggest problem with terminal interfaces is that very little of the functionality is obvious from the outset.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#24On macOS, SysPrefs > Accessibility > Display > Reduce motion will disable some of the unnecessary animations.
I don't know if third party apps can read this setting and also comply.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#25I'm switching away from macOS to Linux with the i3 window manager for precisely this reason. But all of his criticisms of terminals are spot on: no multimedia, no support for anything other than monospaced fonts, etc. Lord, somebody give me a terminal program that produces laid-out text and can show inline video.
If you use mlterm (and supposedly xterm with the right compile flags) you can have inline pixelmaps via DEC -regis- sixel escapes.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#26I'm switching away from macOS to Linux with the i3 window manager for precisely this reason. But all of his criticisms of terminals are spot on: no multimedia, no support for anything other than monospaced fonts, etc. Lord, somebody give me a terminal program that produces laid-out text and can show inline video.
I've always wondered what a tiling window manager provides over tmux. This isn't a rhetorical question, I've never used a tiling window manager.
Anyway, a separate space with full-screened iterm2 + tmux on macos is my preferred way to work. I can swipe left to check slack, browser and then swipe right to go back to my terminal.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#27So to sum up, Terminals Are So Responsive & Fast Users Always Feel It [1]. Animations are bad because they take too long but add no value [2], and terminals render non-english characters super well [3]. I've been researching for a bit, and actually research on how to make a "good" and "accessible" terminal interface is pretty thin on the ground. You can find a lot of opinions but very few with any data backing them.…
> So to sum up
You start with this, and then make two-and-a-half points (I'll kinda give you animation) that the article doesn't. How is that a summation?
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#28The animations serve a valuable purpose, though, especially for new users. They show what's happening. Lots of old UIs (like those running in VT100 emulators) had instant wipes from one view to another, but made it impossible to tell what had happened, or why. Even when I wish animation was faster (like with Spaces, sometimes), I rarely wish it didn't exist at all.
I often have people watching me, and with animations they say "you're working fast!", while in environments with no animation (like Emacs), it's just "I have no idea what you did". I want computers to seem efficient, not unapproachably magic.
What if animations started at a slightly slower speed, and gradually increased in speed the more you used them?
We shouldn't need to pick one animation speed for all users, but we also shouldn't make expert users tweak it manually. And I definitely want to see full animations for new applications that I'm not familiar with yet, but not those in old applications which I've seen 1000 times.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#29I recently got gifted an old Commodore PET. It boots straight into BASIC, so anything you type can be a command or a program, but what’s even cooler is the way the console (they call it “monitor”) works. If you press “up”, rather than scrolling through past commands one by one like in Bash, DOS etc. the cursor simply goes up the screen. You can modify anything you see and hit return to commit. This can be a previous…
Funny thing is that this sounds similar to what was Raskin's big idea for computer interaction.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#30Everything the author describes lacking in the end exists in emacs. Come on in, the water is fine.