Zompist Bboard Again

Thank you!

I've written a short new blog post, on one of my annoyances when it comes to software design:

https://guessishouldputthisupsomewhere. ... -software/

I have written commercial software and menus confuse me too.* I haven't been in UI design myself, but my impression is that management plays a huge role in dragging us into the brave new world of UI innovation. In my experience, programmers are often perfectly content to stay in the bash shell forever. Some of them prefer to exit emacs as little as possible.

PS. Most of my senior computer science professors frankly admit the new UIs confuse the hell out of them.

PPS. To play the devil's advocate, one case in which a new menu system may be justified is when the number of functions in your software has grown so large that it is necessary to re-categorize them. If you don't, then it might take too long to reach your new features. Eg. You might have to click the "show more options" button multiple times every single time. No one's going to do that.

*The problem is that I can't possibly sit down and read the documentation for, say, Microsoft Word from cover to cover. Not going to happen. Instead, I Google keywords: <software name> <function>. Eg. microsoft word change spacing

My favorite UI of all time is the classic ETH Oberon operating system from Switzerland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system) It uses a minimalist combination of text and graphics that applies uniformly to all applications. I read the whole documentation for that system before I graduated high school. You know why? Because it was both usable and logically meaningful, not a heterogeneous collection of disparate elements like mainstream UIs.

Oh, I love TUIs, though I guess that they aren't as well-suited for non-techie computer users as regular GUIs.

I personally find CLI's very off-putting, and would much prefer a GUI wherever possible.

(It's worth noting that I am employed in software development and use the command line for my job frequently)

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Thu Oct 15, 2020 2:14 pm I personally find CLI's very off-putting, and would much prefer a GUI wherever possible.

(It's worth noting that I am employed in software development and use the command line for my job frequently)

I don't spend most of my time in text-based shells either, though I'm learning to appreciate the benefits of routinely typing stuff like this when grading a class:

find ./ra4/ -name 'io.cpp' -exec sh -c 'g++ tokensListing.cpp -std=c++11 -o $(dirname "$1")/a.out -I . -I $(dirname "$1") 2> ra4err.log' _ {} \;

Like I said, my favorite is Oberon, and I wouldn't describe it as a CLI. It is more text-based than Windows, but more of a GUI than bash. It's not like File Manager either. It's very nice. I suppose it depends on what the programmers grew up on, and what kind of work they do.

I have a question for you: Have you read the complete documentation for Microsoft Word?

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Oct 15, 2020 1:54 pm Oh, I love TUIs, though I guess that they aren't as well-suited for non-techie computer users as regular GUIs.

I don't see why it would be unsuitable for intermediate users. There is at least one non-techie who fell into the Emacs rabbit hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU

IIRC: Unlike Emacs, Oberon came with simple text formatting, a graphical calculator, graphical games, graphical simulation software and even a ray tracer. (I don't know, but it looked like a partial retreat towards text starting from something like the Smalltalk environment.) Your software ran everywhere, from bare hardware to Linux to Windows. If you didn't like what an application did, you could change everything. The user could tweak the code or modify the buttons on a panel. The later versions even supported double clicking.

I can't find the official release of the old system, but there's this bootleg version on Github that seems to be running on Windows 10: https://github.com/AlexIljin/WinOberon I don't know if the packages are there. I extracted it to a directory with a simple name I created in the root folder of the drive, installed the fonts, ran the .reg file. Those steps are only required once. I then ran the Oberon.exe file. If this code contains an obscure virus, I'm screwed. Kaspersky, the most paranoid anti-virus software on the market, detected nothing, and I'm hoping this guy isn't ballsy enough to openly upload a virus to Github.

I originally found this software on a CD that came with a PC magazine.

I find the command line much friendlier than dealing with a GUI. I hate having to constantly click and search around to get anything done, and being unable to copy and paste text as I wish. Practically the first thing I do after I end up on a Windows machine (for work of course) is to install some sort of actually usable command line with GNU tools and all.

IIRC Oberon lets you type a CLI-style command and send the contents of a graphical window into it as input. For example, you have a command line program. Just open any window, type text into it and directly send it as input to the command line. Maybe a lot of systems can do that (the Smalltalk environment, maybe?), but I can recall only one.

PS. Also, you can type a CLI-style command in any text window and run it with the mouse.

I have never used Oberon, but I have used Squeak Smalltalk, and I like the idea of them, but at the same time am a bit skeptical of the practicality of image-based systems.

I hate GUIs for systems administration.
I want to script stuff and copy/paste commands. The GUI is just getting in my way!

People seem to love GUIs for git but honestly I don't see the point. If I want to merge, I just type git merge origin <branch> and let git figure shit out. Try to do a merge in a git GUI and it'll show you some horrid diagram that looks like the family tree from Dark.

I suppose your blog post, Raphael, aims at Microsoft. I believe they spectularly failed at UI design this last few years... Part of the problem is that they're too big to fail. They don't even get any market feedback: when Microsoft changes the Word interface, well, there's not much of a choice but to learn the new way of doing things.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Oct 15, 2020 4:18 pm I hate GUIs for systems administration.
I want to script stuff and copy/paste commands. The GUI is just getting in my way!

People seem to love GUIs for git but honestly I don't see the point. If I want to merge, I just type git merge origin <branch> and let git figure shit out. Try to do a merge in a git GUI and it'll show you some horrid diagram that looks like the family tree from Dark.

Exactly; at my work, I always use the command line with git with the sole exception of comparing files, even though for reasons that beat me my coworkers insist on using TortoiseGit for git in general, which I hate using.

I've found the Github Desktop app very usable. It certainly doesn't do anything like what you said when you merge: if there are conflicts, it just tells you and waits for you to resolve them in your editor.

Ultimately I think my preference for GUIs is down to how I learn: I can learn things I see (e.g. the sequence of things to click on in a GUI) faster than things I have to write (e.g. CLI commands with their multitude of flags)

De gustibus non est disputandum. I prefer CLI's where possible; unless you're doing something highly graphical like edting a conworld map, there's no real need for a GUI. Now, if only I could figure out how to integrate my SCA into something ergonomic...

Meanwhile, my cat is trying to tell me something:

the CAT walks across the keyboard

CAT (in subtitles): It's forEach to iterate over a loop in JavaScript; each is Ruby.

ALICE: Ah yes, of course. Thank you, Cat.

A question for people familiar with South America:

Does anyone know places where a cave network might have remained more or less unexplored, and weird meteorological phenomena (strong winds) wouldn't really be noticed?

(That's for conworlding reasons. There are wormholes linking Earth and my conworld, Massotis, and for obvious reasons the Earth end of the gates needs to be well hidden).

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sun Oct 18, 2020 4:35 am A question for people familiar with South America:

Does anyone know places where a cave network might have remained more or less unexplored, and weird meteorological phenomena (strong winds) wouldn't really be noticed?

(That's for conworlding reasons. There are wormholes linking Earth and my conworld, Massotis, and for obvious reasons the Earth end of the gates needs to be well hidden).

Well, I don’t know much about South America, and don’t know much about meteorology either, but I am very interested in geology, so I did a bit of research, and managed to find a relevant article. As best as I can tell from that, the best place to find unexplored caves seems to be Mato Grosso.

And fron this map of South America, it seems the best place to hide strong winds is Santa Cruz Province of Argentina.

If you're looking for a place with both karst terrain and high winds, your best bets are probably the Sierra de San Luis in northern Venezuela, and the Madre de Dios Archipelago in Chile.

I don't get the CLI vs. GUI discussion above. CLIs are nice for batches/scripts, to do routine actions or the same action over a large number of files. GUIs are way more intuitive for novel actions (things you don't do frequently) on a single file, and of course anything that has to do with editing graphics.

Like Kath I also find GUI action sequences way easier to remember than CLI recipes. I've never had to write a textfile to remind myself of an action sequence in a GUI program, but I have several such textfiles with recipes of less frequent actions for CLIs I do use with some frequency (git, ffmpeg, ImageMagick's convert...).



One example. Most of the time, when burning soft subtitles as hard subtitles into a video, I'm burning an SRT file in the lower part, and I know the recipe from memory:

ffmpeg -i "$videofilename" -vf subtitles=subtitlefile.srt "$outputfilename"

But for the very occasional times I need to place another SRT subtitle above, I have to either look at the recipe file, or annoyingly look it up online. It just doesn't happen frequently enough for me to remember it.

ffmpeg -i "$videofilename" -vf subtitles=subtitlefile.srt:force_style='Alignment=6' "$outputfilename"

Oh, BY THE WAY, ffmpeg's manfile says nothing about the force_style subtitle options, such as Alignment=6 for centering subtitles on the top, so I can't use that to remember the options. You gotta find them on a forum mentioned by someone, or obliquely referred to in ffmpeg's online documentation.

And oh, subtitles in the Alpha SubStation format have their own distinct key-value argument format (-vf ass=, rather than -vf subtitles=)—talk about unintuitive! Why doesn't it detect the format from the extension (.ass or .ssa)?

ffmpeg -i "$videofilename" -vf ass=subtitlefile.ass "$outputfilename"

I'm sure if this was a GUI program, I wouldn't have to have textfiles with formulas of this sort, but just click on the relevant menu and dialog box options.



That said, I continue to be dismayed by GUI tools for resolving git conflicts. Is there anything better than vimdiff yet? I need at least four simultaneous screens (the base common ancestor file, the local file, the remote file, and the edited merged file; I find most GUI tools omit the base common ancestor!).

Apart from deep concerns about the legality of my vote, I am also worried about whether it got accepted. If not, I will need to vote in person. As it stands, I have no idea how to check.

malloc wrote: ↑Sun Oct 18, 2020 8:53 pm Apart from deep concerns about the legality of my vote, I am also worried about whether it got accepted. If not, I will need to vote in person. As it stands, I have no idea how to check.

Many states are offering online tracking of mail-in ballots. (Illinois does this, for instance.) What does the official website say?