User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
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Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#2This is what quality software looks like: It has power features around the corner, which can be turned on by experts. But is nevertheless accessible by novices.
CLI is trending amongst dev's again, and we should take a lesson by htop how to design a good user interface.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#3This is what quality software looks like: It has power features around the corner , which can be turned on by experts. But is nevertheless accessible by novices. CLI is trending amongst dev's again, and we should take a lesson by htop how to design a good user interface.
> CLI is trending amongst dev's again
Did it ever stopped being useful?
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#4> You have no idea how many times I was asked “hey, why are some processes green?” over these 15+ years — and no, it wasn’t annoying: each of these times it was an opportunity to teach someone about threads!
That's because there isn't a easy way in htop to discover that.
htop is great, I've used it for a decade, but I didn't know you could hide the threads (Shift+H) until I read this today.
A "View options" / "Advanced" menu item on the bottom bar would help discover these option exists.
I also pressed some key, and some things turned purple, and there's no indication what view is shown, what the purple colour means, and what to do to turn it off.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#5I love htop.
For me the design philosophy worked quite well. I learned so much about my system just by using it and trying to understand all of its output. And I am still learning after years of using it.
I actually like to just sit and watch it sometimes, it's fascinating to me how much a computer does at all times, even when it is idle.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#6> You have no idea how many times I was asked “hey, why are some processes green?” over these 15+ years — and no, it wasn’t annoying: each of these times it was an opportunity to teach someone about threads! That's because there isn't a easy way in htop to discover that. htop is great, I've used it for a decade, but I didn't know you could hide the threads (Shift+H) until I read this today. A "View options" / "Advanc…
There is "F1 Help" in the bottom bar which lists these options, but not in much detail, so it's probably not enough for someone not experience with the tool.
For example, I missed that they use capital and non-capital letters: H (shift+h) toggles the threads, but i sat there opening/closing the help screen by pressing just h. Careful reading of the help screen would have prevented that. As none of the same lowercase/capital letters are next to each other, it is easy to miss.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#7> You have no idea how many times I was asked “hey, why are some processes green?” over these 15+ years — and no, it wasn’t annoying: each of these times it was an opportunity to teach someone about threads! That's because there isn't a easy way in htop to discover that. htop is great, I've used it for a decade, but I didn't know you could hide the threads (Shift+H) until I read this today. A "View options" / "Advanc…
On the other hand I casually looked through settings and found it immediately looking for something entirely different. Settings have a not overwhelming amount of lines each page so a quick glance led me to set whatever I wanted in the first place and things I found out by opportunity
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#8> You have no idea how many times I was asked “hey, why are some processes green?” over these 15+ years — and no, it wasn’t annoying: each of these times it was an opportunity to teach someone about threads! That's because there isn't a easy way in htop to discover that. htop is great, I've used it for a decade, but I didn't know you could hide the threads (Shift+H) until I read this today. A "View options" / "Advanc…
On the other hand I casually looked through settings and found it immediately looking for something entirely different. Settings have a not overwhelming amount of lines each page so a quick glance led me to set whatever I wanted in the first place and things I found out by opportunity
I missed there was a "Display options" in the Setup, maybe it's just me
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#9> You have no idea how many times I was asked “hey, why are some processes green?” over these 15+ years — and no, it wasn’t annoying: each of these times it was an opportunity to teach someone about threads! That's because there isn't a easy way in htop to discover that. htop is great, I've used it for a decade, but I didn't know you could hide the threads (Shift+H) until I read this today. A "View options" / "Advanc…
I didn't know you could click in htop until today; it even works through tmux in mosh without any special configuration.
I think there's a lot to learn in the design philosophy of giving the power to users by default, but if you don't give your users the tools to learn this power they're going to have to ask questions if they want to yield it
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#10> You have no idea how many times I was asked “hey, why are some processes green?” over these 15+ years — and no, it wasn’t annoying: each of these times it was an opportunity to teach someone about threads! That's because there isn't a easy way in htop to discover that. htop is great, I've used it for a decade, but I didn't know you could hide the threads (Shift+H) until I read this today. A "View options" / "Advanc…
"View options" are in Setup menu, which is mentioned in the article.
To be quite honest, I don't know any of the keys not mentioned in F-list at the bottom other than space and I think k, everything was always through Setup Menu.