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Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

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Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#51

Post by nomdehn_180714 »

KirinDave wrote: post #13

So 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.…

I think your criticism misses the mark.

[1] You're answering an article that starts with a 45-second video of Slack opening (surely the worst offender among modern apps) with something about latencies measured in thousandths of a second.

[2] As Nielsen is focused on web apps and applications, this advice is less applicable to UI provided by the OS that you interact with all day in presumably familiar ways. Note that generally "directing user attention" isn't necessary in a shell: output always comes at the bottom. However, be sure to read the "Frequency: Don’t Get in the User’s Way" heading that includes almost verbatim the OP's points against animations that slow the user down.

[3] Yes, internationalization is still hard. At least for Terminal.app, this is basically a solved problem, but of course it's possible for terminal apps (ncurses etc) to need custom support. The situation with web tech is about the same, these things are solved for you if you stick with the basic technologies, but if you get fancy you may need more explicit support.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#52

Post by SteveJS »

Visidata seems like an example of the kind of UI this author thinks would be better. http://visidata.org/

A former coworker used this as his project while on sabbatical at the recurse center.

It is mostly GPL v3, except for MIT license on the core UI.

From the Visidata GitHub page: The innermost core file, vdtui.py, is a single-file stand-alone library that provides a solid framework for building text user interface apps. It is distributed under the MIT free software license, and freely available for inclusion in other projects.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#53

Post by juancampa »

arg84 wrote: post #19

Ironic that the author uses up 2/3 of valuable screen space for the title of the article when a much smaller size would have sufficed. It took me extra time to scroll down to the main content. This just goes to show that aesthetics have more value than perhaps the author is conscious of.

An article, something you use once, is different from an application, which you use continuously for long periods of time

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#54

Post by certifiedloud »

tjr225 wrote: post #26
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #10

I'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.

With i3, all windows benefit from the splitting/tiling behavior. Not just terminal windows.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#55

Post by slrz »

tjr225 wrote: post #26
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #10

I'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.

A window manager manages windows. All of them. Tmux can't manage your PDF viewer or Firefox windows.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#56

Post by micheljansen »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #16
micheljansen wrote: post #11

I 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…

IIRC all Commodore machines did this. The C64 did. That's how you edited a program: you LIST'ed it, and then scrolled up and changed the lines on the screen. When you hit ENTER the new line overwrote the original one. The C64 did not have any way to directly show or edit system memory, though. That's cool.

The C64 was indeed one of the only Commodore machines that did not ship with a Machine Language Monitor. You could however install one: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#57

Post by perishabledave »

I wonder if the 1Password animation only seems egregious to me because I'm not the crowd that it'll add value to. I understand on some level what 1Password does when I enter in my password. If I were to get my parents to use 1Password however, the visual effect of the vault unlocking could help them understand what 1Password does.

I think we may be too quick to judge these things within our own context rather than in the broad range of users which these user systems were designed for.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#58

Post by micheljansen »

digi_owl wrote: post #29
micheljansen wrote: post #11

I 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.

And many years later, Bret Victor

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#59

Post by krylon »

analog31 wrote: post #5

>>> These powerful devices should be propelling our workflows forward with us gangly humans left barely able to keep up, and yet, almost without exception we wait for our computers instead of the other way around. We’re conditioned ourselves to think that waiting 30+ seconds for an app to load, or interrupting our workflow to watch a half second animations a thousand times a day, are perfectly normal. In addition, th…

On the one hand, a voice interface would be really great. Think of a car - you could control things (open/close the windows, turn the AC on/off, change the radio station, ...) just by talking without ever taking your eyes off the road. This might actually prevent a few accidents.[0]

On the other hand, imagine the office where I work, one room, four people, and imagine them talking to their computers instead of typing or mouse clicking.

[0] I have no idea how many accidents are caused by drivers looking at their radio, AC control, whatever. I am conviced the number is greater than zero, but I suspect it is only small fraction of the overall number of traffic accidents. But still.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#60

Post by gav »

nomdehn_180714 wrote: post #51
KirinDave wrote: post #13

So 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.…

I think your criticism misses the mark. [1] You're answering an article that starts with a 45-second video of Slack opening (surely the worst offender among modern apps) with something about latencies measured in thousandths of a second. [2] As Nielsen is focused on web apps and applications, this advice is less applicable to UI provided by the OS that you interact with all day in presumably familiar ways. Note that…

> 45-second video of Slack opening (surely the worst offender among modern apps

I hate to defend Slack as it's far from snappy, but comparing it to a console app seems hardly fair.

I wonder how much of it's slowness is due to network requests? I could make the argument that git is slow because when I clone a large repository it takes a while.

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