Good Tools Are Invisible

> The article talks about this from the users side, how there is a class of user who enjoys learning all of these “extra” features, even though they ultimately provide less value than the core features.

With Vim, Emacs, Git,... there's a core concept that all those extras get backs to. The issue with normal editor is that their concept of a text file is an array of lines of characters. Some goes further with providing some parsing to further isolate things like strings or symbols.

With Vim, there's the buffer (aka the content), the window (where user view the content), the cursor (which is the point of origin of many actions) and various commands that moves the cursor according to what's in the buffer. Like with the hand, you can draw, write, make dough, play the piano,..., you use the same hand, you don't have to replace it to do any other actions, you only taught yourself how to do it.

Same with git. It has a core concept that encapsulate everything to do with versioning text files, you just have to compose them to do what you want.

This kind of conceptual simplicity, even though the interfacing may be rough, is good because you are solving classes of problems instead of solving them one at time. For a particular problem, you only need to switch configurations, not to learn a new tool.

The issue is when you tackle a bunch of features not related to each other, or simplify the model so much that it's a toy instead of a tool.

I think I have the same perspective. I see it as a flavor of progressive disclosure. Sane defaults and a way to customize if needed. Start with the 80% case and let people customize if they want to. It needs to be optional.

Especially with developer tools I think there's a hesitancy to be opinionated. If you don't know for sure an option is "always correct" it seems safer to ask the user. Developers can be very pedantic. "95% of people probably want it this way, but I should make people pick because that 5% has a valid point". But now you've made it worse for most users.

It's also so much more complicated to support customization, more than I think people realize. It's not just about bugs, every option makes polishing your UX much more difficult. Both because of the testing surface and also because more flexible abstractions are harder to design.

I find the best features, or mechanics in games too, are ones that fall out of greater architectural design. For example, if you've ever played popular hero shooter games like Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, or Paladins, they all have different physics engines; you can tell as you switch between the games. Which one's the "most correct" is up for personal interpretation, but they all try to grant the player affordances, abilities, and special 'tech' all while staying a simple engine for models and hitboxes to interact in.

Then there's coyote time and networking latency. All these little but meaningful details to consider on top of the base action of making a space for 'things to happen'.

When implementing a feature, I feel I'm always thinking back to when I'd get frustrated with the ways Paladins characters clip on walls more than in Overwatch, or the jarring air mobility difference between games like TF2 and the floaty feel found in the others already mentioned so far. I want the feature to feel like it could emerge as a result of the first natural instinct from play. Like when you enter a game world and you obviously know the keyboard and mouse 'control the world', so you start there and begin mapping your intuition of the experience. It starts with the surface visual communications. The HUD, the world itself, the buttons. Maybe your keyboard lights up and shows you what keys to press (chroma sdk for example). Then gets deeper as your experience grows. And the best features, ui, designs, games, etc. engage people who are curious enough to keep digging without enforcing the digging upon the average user.

One important thing falls out of a design philosophy like that. You never exclude a power user, and never baby a new user. It just... is the tool itself.

So that's why they are so hard to find!

I'm pretty sure he's just finding the most condescending way he can think of to "correct" people who have a lower tolerance for paper cuts than he has.

The author's message is really "You idiots that can't just ignore the friction you can't fix, and change your habits and workflows to match what the corporate overlords know you really need should just STFU with your tips and tricks for how to customize your power tools, because I don't do that, so why should you?"