Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

In our package repository web interface we aimed for high information density over design fluff: https://cppget.org Especially our builds page.

Too bad the website somehow has comments which make Reddit look saintly. Seriously, their moderation is abhorrent.

There is (was?) an absolutely fabulous answer on quora.com which detailed how this site came to be --- from memory:

- initial ecommerce site was a mess (basically a page-by-page recreation of the catalog?) which saw minimal usage

- the redesign, which focused on usability --- notably reduced cognitive load --- resulted in an immediate uptick in orders which grew markedly for a long while until it represented the vast majority of their business EDIT: and also optimized for repeat orders on a schedule

If someone could find that, or a better writeup, I'd be grateful (it's _not_ the Medium.com article) and this page: https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ is just a mentioning by the company which did the underpinnings, not the overall architect. This link is decent: https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr

There was of course previous discussion of this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502

Video on why the site loads so fast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ

(which is from the Medium.com article)

I find Geizhals' filtering options reasonably compact and information dense. https://geizhals.de/?cat=gra16_512&xf=132_16384&pg=1&view=li...

I like the simple table view of RPiLocator. Only a few columns, but lots of rows, no unneeded clutter. https://rpilocator.com/

Not as compact as possible, but at least shows quite some information: GSMArena. It could fit more phones into the comparison table with less whitespace/greyspace though. https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=10386&idPhone...

All sites as viewed on desktop, on mobile this would likely not work out.

I also want to echo the command line tools mention in another comment. GDB's TUI is reasonable for my use, but after some experience this recently posted terminal debugger might be better: https://github.com/al13n321/nnd via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905185

Also the hex editor I am currently using, despite some problems: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

An example of an information dense GUI that might be a bit overwhelming is Ghidra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghidra (page includes a basic screenshot, you can fill your screen(s) with as many sub windows and information panes as you want)

As a side note, while trying to find examples I realized just how few websites there are (any more?) that show a lot of information at the same time. Worst recent offender is YouTube's redesign with only 3 video tiles in a row on a 1440p screen, luckily easily fixed via a ublock rule.

The ft has some good stuff, this is probably a good jumping off point https://www.ft.com/content/c7bb24c9-964d-479f-ba24-03a2b2df6...