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Absolutely not THIS is the peak of user interface design!
mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/11…
Can we all just agree UI design peaked here?
marmarta
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Another Person
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Morten Juhl-Johansen
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Scimon Proctor
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Only because it shows :q on the page (and negative points for not showing :q! )
I have never forgiven vi for not starting in insert mode. And I never will.
When I open a text editor I want to type stuff and it to appear on the screen.
Wombatadon
in reply to Scimon Proctor • • •Emacs
(looking for my flame proof underwear)
MarjorieR
in reply to Wombatadon • • •I vote for Gimp as worst commonly used FOSS UI.
Charlie Stross
in reply to MarjorieR • • •MarjorieR
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •What little coding I do these days (mostly bash scripts) I do in gedit, but the truth is I'm also not to a fan of the standard GNU graphic interface either.
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Charlie Stross • •@Charlie Stross @MarjorieR a lot of the people I know that use emacs use evil mode or something like that (i.e. an implementation of the vi user interface) as their text editor
just saying :D
Charlie Stross
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
nat
in reply to Scimon Proctor • • •> When I open a text editor I want to type stuff and it to appear on the screen.
That makes sense if your most common scenario is starting with an empty file and writing the whole thing in one go.
But if you've got a non-empty file, just typing in new stuff at the beginning or end without looking around first isn't terribly useful.
Scimon Proctor
in reply to nat • • •@nat
Sure, but after I've looked around the file when I start pressing the letter keys I want letters to appear.
If I want the letters to invoke deep magic I want to press other keys to tell the editor I want to do this.
I open files a lot. Everyday, very very rarely do I blindly start typing.
But when I find the place I want to start typing I don't want to have to remember that the editor expects me to tell it "I'm ready to start typing now."
Charlie Stross
in reply to Scimon Proctor • • •The default behaviour for "I ran this text editor on $somefile, what do I do now?" should be DON'T ALTER DATA. Back when Bill Joy invented vi in 1976 *almost nobody had used a visual editor before*. Nobody would have known what to expect.
The clear risk was that some idiot with root privs would encounter vi for the first time by typing "vi /etc/rc" or "vi /etc/fstab" and thereby ensure whackiness eventuated.
vi starting strictly in command mode avoided this hazard trivially.
Scimon Proctor
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@nat
Yeah, and I guess that made sense in the 70's when no one had used an editor like that. I get it.
But it's not the 70's anymore. The first time I opened vi in the late 90's it was not my first visual editor. It wasn't even in the first five different editors I'd used at that point.
And it threw me, and frankly I don't think I've ever forgiven it.
Charlie Stross
in reply to Scimon Proctor • • •Scimon Proctor
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •I guess this is the great thing about the world it takes all sorts. :)
I'm sorry if my original post was too confrontational. It was early and I'd not had enough coffee.
Merc
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Merc
in reply to nat • • •Charlie Stross
in reply to Merc • • •Merc
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@nat @scimon I would bet that for its time, vi was a really well designed program. But daily driving vi today seems like driving a horseless carriage on modern streets.
To be fair, it's not the same horseless carriage from a century ago. It has decades worth of updates. But, its drivers still insist that the tiller is the ideal method of steering an automobile.
Everyday Cyborg
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Oblomov
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Charlie Stross reshared this.
Frank 🛰️🛩️🪂⛵🛵🎿🔭
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •That is another thing that adds to the confusion. They should have added a sentence explaining you have to type the colon character. I would easily assume it means "type: this" with weird justified block text alignment resulting in "type :this" 😆
Like "type <Colon>q<Enter>"... but that's the misstery... mysteri... missery... the "vim-style"!
Martin
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •you have to stirr up the vi religion now and then, don't you?
Guido Kollerie
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Always found Borland's Turbo Vision the peak of user interface design.
Fortunately, that kind of text based user interface design is getting a comeback of some sorts. See:
Ratatui
RatatuiCharlie Stross
in reply to Guido Kollerie • • •@guido Borland (like Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS, and even Windows 3.1) followed IBM's CUI guidelines for keyboard accelerators/control keys, which were WELL THOUGHT OUT AND CONSISTENT—you could navigate the menu system and do everything using the keyboard. As consistent as vi or emacs once you learned them, but universal in intent.
Then Microasoft threw the ball into the long grass as of Windows 95 and Apple never picked it up to begin with (hey have you seen our new mouse, yo).
Guido Kollerie
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Re: Apple never picking up IBM's CUI guidelines
It's the reason I have to resort to hacks on MacOS like shortcat.app/
Shortcat: Universal command palette for your Mac | Shortcat
shortcat.appRev. Odessa Cathode Ray
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •radon
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Charlie Stross
in reply to radon • • •@radon
vim, of course!
macOS today is a horrible debauched and degenerate descendant of NeXTStep, which was almost tolerable, but macOS is trying to evolve into iPadOS, which in turn is a jumped-up large screen iOS (the phone OS), which seems to e taking design cues these days from their idiotic useless AR headset (I tell a lie, maybe? It has a reported good use case: watching movies. Also tagging specific cooking pots with kitchen timers! So, a $3500 kitchen timer.)
Charlie Stross
Unknown parent • • •Charlie Stross
Unknown parent • • •Quixoticgeek
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •raptor
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Futurist Jim Carroll
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •This is the type of argument we should be having these days!
And so I'll chime in to start a flame war.
**SysVinit vs SystemD**
**Clearly, SysVinit.**
Rachel Rawlings
in reply to Futurist Jim Carroll • • •@jimcarroll I'm not getting into Vim vs Emacs, Gnome vs KDE, Debian vs Rhel vs Arch or any of their siblings and children fighting amongst themselves.
But systemd is the most cursed, bastardized, overcomplicated and overcompensating crock that has ever been forced upon Linux users. (AI is still a choice, after all.)
Liam Proven
in reply to Futurist Jim Carroll • • •@jimcarroll
> **Clearly, SysVinit.**
I mean, look, it's got "Vi" in it. It's right there in the name.
Dr. Christopher Kunz
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@nikitonsky I see your Word and vim and raise you one TeXnicCenter. Where even capitalization is a challenge.
Charlie Stross
in reply to Dr. Christopher Kunz • • •Dr. Christopher Kunz
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Jens Link
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@christopherkunz @nikitonsky
$EDITOR + Markdown + pandoc is also a good way to produce .docx.
Michael Bacon
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@cstross
Ricardo B�nffy
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •gronk
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Judge Earl P. Thayton
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •I don't really have a dog in this fight but this video is hilarious.
Niki
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Epiphanic Synchronicity
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •George R. R. Martin would doubtless beg to differ. #wordstar