Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002 (2015)

https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/

by beefhash • 7 years ago

324 182 7 years ago

anders.unix.se

samdung• 7 years ago

I seem to be falling in love with the data density of the old layouts. Nowadays i need to scroll endlessly to see little information.

moreira• 7 years ago

Old designs used to fit more data in 1024x768 (or 800x600) than we get now in high-res, high-DPI widescreen displays.

There's a personal finance app I use that was recently modernised, and it went from being able to show me 50 transactions on a 1920x1080 screen to barely being able to display little over 10 transactions at a time. No improvement, just... padding.

bluedino2• 7 years ago

Viewable on mobile now.

VLM3• 7 years ago

The padding is for future advertisements

martin-adams• 7 years ago

I suspect a driving factor in this is touch interface which needs a larger surface area to interact with while in a desktop view.

jodrellblank2• 7 years ago

https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

this calendar widget. [..] My gripe with this design aesthetic is the loss of information density. I'm an adult human being sitting at a large display, with a mouse and keyboard. I deserve better. Not every interface should be designed for someone surfing the web from their toilet.

Here's what the PayPal site used to look like. I never fell to my knees to thank God for giving me the gift of sight so that I might behold the beauty of the old PayPal interface. But it got the job done. Here's the PayPal website as it looks today. The biggest element on the page is an icon chastising me that I haven't told PayPal what I look like. Next to that is a useless offer to 'download the app', and then an offer for a credit card. I can no longer control the sort order, there are no filter tools, and you see there are far fewer entries visible without scrolling.

dev_dull2• 7 years ago

Mint alternative? What app?

livebsd• 7 years ago

I used to run flashy DEs years ago. Enlightenment for all those who remember, with all the bells and whistles turned on.

As years went by, I started to remove everything. I now use an automatic tiling window manager with no borders. I actively disable all animations, and I use colors much more thoughtfully (color yes, but only where it is needed), so that by default my laptop looks a lot more like those old screenshots than a today colorful tablet.

I'm now quite pedantic on how text should be rendered the way _I_ want, and it should be the same _everywhere_.

So in a sense, I see why the current look is attractive and my younger-self would approve, but in retrospective the bland-but-consistent look is what I eventually moved on to by choice for a lot of reasons.

The current UI trend in my mind is considerably worse from an UI perspective than what Windows 3.1/95 (and same-era DEs) would offer.

Shorel7• 7 years ago

I used to use Lucida Console for that reason. It looks good and the distance between lines seems to be smaller than many other monospaced fonts.

darshanime2• 7 years ago

People say Russ Cox was inspired to use acme after looking at Ritchie's desktop. Probably even this picture.

nabla93• 7 years ago

What? No screenshot from Donald Knuth's desktop!

here: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/screen.jpeg

And here is the config file: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/.fvwm2rc

pgtan• 7 years ago

fvwm with FvwmPager: best "desktop" forever!

nabla93• 7 years ago

This is the truth.

Retr0spectrum• 7 years ago

It would be really interesting to see a follow-up 17(!) years later.

darshanime2• 7 years ago

everyone running chrome on macs

fb03• 7 years ago

this is so sad, yet probably so friggin accurate.

I used linux in 2002 and the sentiment i get is that the whole desktop environment thingy is getting all bloated and padded. heck, those kde screenshots show so much stuff on such a small screen, right?

And it was all really snappy on a p166mmx with a meager 64megs of ram.

vortico• 7 years ago

Here it was 15 years later. https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developer...

geggam2• 7 years ago

Heh... This one makes laugh. A port maintainer has his desktop config in Salt

'screenshot as code', I maintain my desktop configuration through saltstack: https://github.com/TTimo/linux-salted/commits/master

mikedelfino• 7 years ago

There's a 2015 edition as well: https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developer...

dpau• 7 years ago

"Still just a browser window and a ton of terminals hiding behind them." -Rasmus Lerdorf

Yep :)

smudgymcscmudge• 7 years ago

The biggest difference is I added git status to my shell prompt sometime between 2002 and 2015.

Shorel7• 7 years ago

OSX really did look good back in 2002.

It still stands out, even among all the current screenshots.

mullikine2• 7 years ago

Yay! An old emacs screenshot and an early vim. I'm satisfied. Brian Kernighan's is the most beautiful though. Such purity

wyclif• 7 years ago

I agree...simplicity reveals the pure beauty of life.

pavlov4• 7 years ago

Ergonomics research has shown a long time ago that dark text on light background is easier to read on computer screens for long periods of time. These screenshots demonstrate that developers in 2002 had got the message.

Young developers nowadays seem to mostly use dark backgrounds, which to me feels like a weird '70s throwback. I suspect it's primarily an identity signal: it's harder to feel like you're hacking The Matrix if your IDE looks like Word from a distance.

newsgremlin• 7 years ago

What is needed is alternating themes based on the real world day/night cycle. Even though when the sun goes down that arguable should be the time that screen time should be cut anyway.

pavlov4• 7 years ago

For me, macOS "Night Shift" does the job well enough. It gradually shifts the overall color temperature to warm at the end of the day.

boomlinde2• 7 years ago

If you are using X11, you can use xcalib to modify gamma/brightness/contrast of the color channels individually. My own quick hack is "xcalib -invert -alter" which simply inverts the colors. This probably breaks subpixel rendering, though, but IMO subpixel rendering looks like crap on low resolution displays and is pointless on high resolution displays.

thrwayxyz3• 7 years ago

Light themes during the nights are murder on the eyes. Give me a nice solarised light theme during the day and a dark one at night.

paranoidrobot• 7 years ago

Ergonomics research has shown a long time ago that dark text on light background is easier to read on computer screens for long periods of time.

I have to wonder whether that research took into consideration how large and bright modern displays are, and for the duration that modern IT professionals are using them for.

I would guess that the majority of these people would have been using 15-19" CRT monitors, and mostly single displays.

In pretty much every office that I've seen, most people have two or three 23-27" displays. Modern LCD panels are also extremely bright.

Staring at that much screen realestate with primarily light/white colours can be painful for long periods of time. It certainly feels less uncomfortable to use a darker theme.

imglorp• 7 years ago

Also, did that research have variables for ambient lighting (in field of view but not from the display) and for screen glare? A 360-degree bright cube farm is much different from a dim room with a desk lamp facing away. Your eyes respond differently and I would love to know more.

I suspect the real answer is a big, fat, "it depends."

DyslexicAtheist• 7 years ago

I have been using solarized-dark for a long time and switched to light background for a few years only to be back in a dark mode everywhere.

I find this much easier on my eyes than light theme. Especially when I read some pdf's just before bed and all lights are off where my screen is the only source of brightness. Granted I also reduce my laptop screen brightness and pdf viewer (Zathura or Mupdf) supports custom colors (solarized dark). My eyes never get too tired.

I've also used redshift for some time but I don't need the gamma reduction actually with the above approach. At night my laptop looks very similar to "e-paper" or a Kindle. And my gf who has to get up a couple of hours earlier doesn't even notice my late night reading next to her.

pavlov4• 7 years ago

Turn the brightness down to something not much brighter than a sheet of paper on your desk. You can always turn it up to watch a movie.

The brightness setting is like the adjustments on a car driver seat: the point is not to always use an extreme of the range. You probably wouldn’t move the seat all the way back just because the setting exists.

292355744930110• 7 years ago

I have to wonder whether that research took into consideration how large and bright modern displays are, and for the duration that modern IT professionals are using them for.

The answer is no.

boomlinde2• 7 years ago

I would guess that the majority of these people would have been using 15-19" CRT monitors, and mostly single displays.

I doubt that this is the reason. On a CRT I prefer bright text on dark backgrounds because it minimizes visible flicker. Where the screen is dark on a CRT, the beam is simply off. This becomes especially important if the monitor has low refresh rate and/or fast phosphor. I think that it's for this reason that a lot of (actual) terminals have really long afterglow phosphor and use bright text on dark backgrounds. It's basically a prerequisite to use them regularly for any extended amount of time. Newer CRTs improve the situation considerably, though, with much faster refresh rates to compensate for the short afterglow necessary for media like games and video.

Overall I think that using CRTs is more exhausting than LCDs, even taking into consideration the typical size of a computer CRT display compared to a modern office dual LCD setup. After a couple of hours of use of a 15" 2002 CRT my eyes feel dry and sandy, and the problem is exacerbated by bright screen content. Also, my LCDs (at home and at work) are not nearly as bright as my CRTs.

On LCDs I tend to use bright backgrounds in daylight because it seems much easier to read, and the screen doesn't need to be so bright. In the dark, I use dark backgrounds because bright screens easily become the brightest thing in the room with little natural lighting. In practice this means a bright theme at work and a dark theme at home.

I can't wait for paper-like unlit desktop displays with fast refresh rates. IMO it's the most important step for improved computer ergonomics. Then we can fully embrace natural lighting e.g. during summer time office hours, which is healthy for soul and body and easier on the eyes than basically staring into a lamp. Also potentially a lot more energy efficient.

ascar• 7 years ago

It's simply much, much easier for me to work with a dark background. Not fully black, but preferably a bit in the purple direction. You are not top-down reading most of the time, but working on lines, jumping between them. That's much easier for me on a black background, because the text pops out and the background "noise" is much easier on the eyes.

When you're reading a block of text, you interact much less with the background than when you're searching and jumping between lines.

fyfy18• 7 years ago

I like my screen to be dim, and find that the white parts of an LCD are usually too bright, even when the brightness is turned right down. I expect an off-white or grey background on an OLED screen would be better, but they haven't made their way to the desktop yet.

On my phone with an OLED screen I still prefer white-on-black, but that's mainly because even at the lowest brightness it is still far too bright at night.

rq1• 7 years ago

Can you provide some references?

Using vi for 5y here (switched to neovim) in dark mode, with nofrils-dark[1] theme now, I don’t feel any less productive, on the contrary I can focus for way longer than before.

[1] https://github.com/robertmeta/nofrils/blob/master/README.md

Crinus13• 7 years ago

Young developers nowadays seem to mostly use dark backgrounds, which to me feels like a weird '70s throwback

Everything "young developers" nowadays do seem to me a weird '70s throwback - from the proliferation of the command line (as opposed to actually trying to create advanced GUI tools for people who know what they are doing, like a lot of developers did in the late 90s/early 2000s whereas today you mainly have dumbed down GNOME 3 lookalikes), to using tiling and lightweight window managers "for performance" on "low end computers" when those low end computers have massive supercomputer abilities compared to the computers that people used -again- in the 90s with UIs that did WAY more stuff despite their limited performance, to having crude dumb TUIs that look and behave worse than what you'd get in DOS in the 80s, etc.

VLM3• 7 years ago

"crude dumb TUI"

Text is the most expressive GUI ever invented, but only for literate people.

pjmlp3• 7 years ago

Having started coding in the mid-80's I really don't get it.

I was thrilled when I finally had the opportunity to use graphical workstations.

pard682• 7 years ago

The mouse is the least ergonomic input device. I have a trackball which is mildly better. Until someone develops a pointing device that doesn't cause rsi I will stick to tiling wms and terminals.

I am also an order of magnitude faster at my job than my colleagues stuck in gui land,pecking away at their IDEs. Not to mention I have a greater command of the languages we use because I am not relying on an AI to guess syntax for me.

thrwayxyz3• 7 years ago

The Unix tools don't work on guis. Piping between applications on the command line is still faster and simpler to hack together than a real solution. I don't feel the need for anything more because the desktop is pretty much dead and so are the metaphors it used. We might as well be complaint that the devs today aren't designing a touch based interface to get real work done on a phone. Me and my Bluetooth keyboard on termux are doing well enough thank you very much.

MisterTea• 7 years ago

You seem to be confused, developers work with text. What more can computing power bring to text? The only thing all that CPU and GPU power brought to the desktop is useless power wasting eye candy like beryl or whatever it's called now.

Plus, in this environmentally conscious time, isn't it nice that people want to do more with less? Why waste GPU cycles adding shadows and lens flares to text? I don't get it.

I like using tiling WM's (dwm and Awesome) because they organize windows for me and nothing is hidden in a bar. The concept of workspaces is much nicer than shuffling windows around a screen. I can quickly jump between workspaces and immediatly see my windows and contents. What more do I need? GPU rendering of windows? Why?

I along with many others enjoy doing more with less. My old i3 Thinkpad runs just fine. Plays youtube videos, streams music and edits text using OpenBSD. What more do I need? Why pointlessly throw more at a problem that doesn't need it?

alpaca1282• 7 years ago

I'm using Vim and i3 and not for performance, but simply because they are efficient and more flexible. Together with Vim browser plugins I can do almost everything on my PC without having to use the mouse, and with the right setup this can drastically decrease the input latency.

Modern PCs being insanely fast doesn't mean we have to use software that requires insanely fast computers.

bregma3• 7 years ago

Guis. Pictures. A picture is worth 1000 words. Why use 1000 words to express something when one or two will do?

anthk9• 7 years ago

Before Unix, W98 and it's DOS legacy were a damn joke.

I lost hours discovering what an icon/menu did or what a function actually meant in an IDE/advanced suite.

The Windows API was utterly nonsense.

When I discovered Unix, Ksh, AWK, and TCL/TK, I was in heaven. Easy, straightforward, composable, and you could AUTOMATE stuff.

Oh, about tiling/Gnome 3, I don't care. I have a FLOATING WM with virtual desktops (tags), and crontab handles everything else.

With a few scripts, I get the work done.

Try that with Windows.

traverseda• 7 years ago

When gnome 3 came out I had to find something else to use, so I chose one of those "light weight tiling window managers" since if I was going to be setting up something custom anyway I might as well do some research on it.

I've ~yelled at~ talked to a bunch of gnome developers trying to figure out exactly what's going on. I think that they're making the weird UI decisions in the name of "inclusiveness". They believe that simpler apps, and a standard unified ecosystem, makes things easier for marginalized groups to adopt free-software. All their weird technical decisions ultimately seem to be justified by making things easier for marginalized groups.

Draiken• 7 years ago

On my case, I've switched to tiling window managers because it streamlined my work and made me a lot more efficient. It has nothing to do with "performance" in the computing sense.

I've tried to use the existing "containers" systems on regular desktops and they simply sucked. Not even close to what I get on i3.

This idea of using the mouse to click on everything you need to do is something I cannot get around. Creating advanced GUI tools for "people who know what they are doing" sounds counter-intuitive to me. If you know what you are doing, you can use the damn command line.

GUIs are normally built with less features and/or dumbed down versions for the average user, not the other way around. I suppose if we forced ourselves to build better GUIs that were super flexible, this wouldn't be true. But the reality of today (or ever?) is that normally if you know what you're doing, you're using a CLI and not a GUI.

Shorel7• 7 years ago

Mmmm there's a bit of truth there.

I have to use HeidiSQL in Linux via Wine because IMO all GUI MySQL clients written for Gnome are either not powerful enough or are just memory hogs.

But you will have to kill me before I use something that's not a dark theme in my code editor.

Aardwolf• 7 years ago

I use light text on dark background to get less blue light in the evening, and during the day I also feel that less light from monitor is better

nabla93• 7 years ago

According to my cursory study, ergonomic research leaves out many variables and settings.

Do you know research validating or contracting these claims:

- light text on dark background in dark room better

- dark text in light background in bright room is better

- light text on dark background is better when refresh rate is low

- the font size changes the situation.

My personal experience after some testing is that light on dark with slightly larger monospace font that 'feels right' [1] leads to fastest long term reading and comfort. Also light on dark background is always better in dark room. Otherwise dark on light is better. Back in a day when we all had low resolution CRT monitors font size was large for everyone and light on dark was common.

[1] If I just sit in a monitor and set up my programming environment I settle to text size that I can read well but is still relatively small. It seems reasonable that you want to see more text. But if I choose little bigger font than what 'feels' right I can read faster. Large font, light on dark background seems optimal.

bluedino2• 7 years ago

I can’t even use a dark theme on a matte laptop in a bright room

twic• 7 years ago

I suspect it's primarily an identity signal: it's harder to feel like you're hacking The Matrix if your IDE looks like Word from a distance.

This is also my theory. My theory is that "hacker signals" like dark backgrounds, tricked-out shell config, and using vim are more common in language communities where people feel insecure about their claim to technical status - or rather, about the acceptance by others of their entirely legitimate claim - such as those of Ruby and JavaScript.

mgkimsal• 7 years ago

such as those of Ruby and JavaScript.

it may just be my own circle, but comparing the Ruby folks I know from 10 years ago to the Ruby folks I know now... there's fewer of them, and those that remain using Ruby day to day never went in for those 'hacker signals'. But the Ruby folks I know from 10 years ago who've left and moved in to other arenas (like JavaScript) did throw use some of that sort of signaling.

jnbiche• 7 years ago

using vim are more common in language communities where people feel insecure about their claim to technical status

What about us greybeards who just feel naked without vi/vim? I've ended up (due to market demand) in the frontend world, but I still use vim because I feel horribly unproductive plodding around with a mouse and arrow keys in Visual Studio or what have you. Yes, given a few weeks I could learn the shortcuts and be more productive, but I can't imagine I'd ever reach my vim level of productivity (same applies to emacs users as to vim users, I'm sure). So why put myself through that?

Just something to keep in mind. Many of us use vim because that's what we're used to. And to be fair to the younger developers, some of them see how productive vim users are in navigating a document and make the switch. Nothing to do with "signaling".

mullikine2• 7 years ago

Shadows on the wall -- Plato. This is a non issue with e-ink monitors. Neither side is correct. Until that day when all monitors are e-ink, I don't have to read ergonomics research to tell which is best. I just go with what my pain receptors and common sense tells me. The beaming white background of hacker news is making my head hurt and when I return to my black terminal I become aware suddenly of the rest of the room.

onion2k• 7 years ago

Wouldn't the change in display technology from CRT to LCD make a huge difference? I'm not suggesting the ergonomics research from the era was wrong, but a new study could come up with very different recommendations today.

z3phyr• 7 years ago

I don't know. I work with rootkits and do Reverse Engineering stuff, (I believe that's the most "hackerpunk" you can get), and my setup is Emacs with leauven theme, pretty standard IDA white and Sumatra PDF viewer for reading (Everything on MS Windows no less). Its feels pretty great!

VLM3• 7 years ago

Having been around then, light backgrounds on old CRTs really showed off astigmatism and non-linearity and blooming and general problems of the technology, and 2002 is modern enough for "famous tech people" to have LCDs. Light backgrounds were a display of conspicuous consumption for those who could afford LCDs.

Blooming, for kids these days, is when the HV supply of a CRT is poorly regulated in a constant-power sense and changes in display brightness cause changes in electron beam current cause fluctuation in acceleration voltage literally make the screen zoom in and out a couple percent while under high load. The poor regulation was usually worse under high current demand, so you could "clear ; top" a black background and there would be no weird zoom effects but a white background might zoom flutter in and out as the content of the screen varied. Very annoying to have one window flutter a little because another had its content change.

Interference and weird aliasing problems showed up in vast fields of illuminated white background more than unlit black background. Retrace lines looked particularly awful on large fields of white. Yes there's a clamping circuit that SHOULD totally shut off the beam on vert-retrace but as you'd expect it looked awful on a $200 CRT monitor and beautiful on a $1000+ monitor. Its just not noticeable on a black background.

There was also a filtering effect, light backgrounds having terrible image quality, a tech giant of 2002 spent decades staring into mostly black background terminals so anyone who in 2019 would not be able to stand black backgrounds was simply filtered out of the pool of possible tech giants back in that era. If you couldn't stare into the abyss of a TRS-80 model III black background sorta low res CRT display for 40+ hours per week, you simply had to leave the computing field in 1981, for example.

The only times we used light backgrounds on CRTs was for non-text purposes (games) and very strange lighting problems (the hated glossy screen with a light source reflected into your eyes, perhaps a very bright CRT background would reduce the massive glare distraction)

To some extent USABLE white background on a CRT was conspicuous consumption in that it was unusable on a $250 monitor or a TV connected to a 1980s home computer but usable white background CRT meant someone bought a $1000+ fancy name brand monitor. Anyone could have a decent black background display regardless of personal wealth but a white background meant you wanted everyone to know you had money, or at least you had money before you spent it, LOL.

WRT conspicuous consumption I was multi-monitor back to the 80s (aka multiple machine on desk) and CRTs were an absolute nightmare where a 70 hz monitor next to a 60 hz monitor made both unreadable or in some ways it was even worse to have a 60.01 hz VGA card next to a 59.99 hz card because then you'd get a magnetic interference crawlie that crept up the screen slowly like a visual hallucination. The tech giants in the linked article were not doing tech work (generally) as most listed people most were (generally) managers and as such having one monitor on a desk for gnatt chart manipulation and email and such was typical for managers of that era, even if the techie front line personnel had three (or more) monitors on their desk.

One of the most interesting interior design aspects of the CRT to LCD transition about two decades ago is my multiple monitors on my desk at home went from as far separated as possible to as close as possible due to no more interference. Roughly as interesting was the transition from 4:3 monitors to wide TV aspect ratios.

rjsw• 7 years ago

The Atari ST B&W monitors worked well with a white background.

varjag• 7 years ago

Between 1980s state of the art and 2000s early LCD era however were the 1990s with fairly usable quality CRTs.

rudiv2• 7 years ago

Use Nord theme and confuse old heads with your aesthete!

usermac• 7 years ago

I, for one, welcome our dark background.

toyg2• 7 years ago

This is the HN equivalent of avocado-toast bashing. Let’s not do that.

As someone who used dark themes with CRTs whenever possible in the ‘90s, my theory is simply that those studies you mention were academic horseshit - CRTs with bright backgrounds were eye-killers. Well, they were eye-killers in general, but more when set with bright backgrounds.

Unfortunately, colorbleed in small-size text made it a bit more difficult to read text on dark backgrounds, but that could be somewhat compensated with larger fonts if you had a big enough display. So basically you could choose two different ways to kill yourself, but one of them gave you a chance if you were rich enough (and lucky enough - most programs on Windows never allowed you to change their white background). Man, CRT was so shit.

LCDs are much better in general, and occasionally worse (a lot of games make my eyes cry, with their aggressively shiny palettes). I still prefer dark out of habit in most cases, but it really depends on the monitor (and its calibration) and the surroundings. Saying one mode or the other is superior in all circumstances is silly, imho. And certainly wouldn’t bash millennials, or question their geek-manliness, for choosing this or that mode.

mbrock• 7 years ago

I’ve always liked to work at night or early morning or northern European winter afternoons and since 2002 it’s been obvious to me that a dark but not black background with a medium contrast text is optimal for day and night, especially the Zenburn theme. Please don’t come to my house at night and switch to a white theme because of “science”...

pavlov4• 7 years ago

Of course everyone can use whatever they want. Arguments of taste are irresistible, that's all. (Did I mention I like proportional fonts?)

The bashing is mostly the other way around though. I regularly get shit from people because I prefer white backgrounds. It's also some kind of meme — just the other day I saw a popular tweet that read "People who use light background IDEs are serial killers." As an edge case GenX-millennial who buys expensive avocados and lets them rot, it's pretty much my glass house for rock-throwing practice anyway...

segmondy• 7 years ago

I've always used green on black for 20+ years now, and loving it. White terminal with black fonts hurts my eyes.

vthriller• 7 years ago

Relevant discussion from not so long ago about backgrounds and screen/ambient brightness and whatnot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607699

GordonS• 7 years ago

I'm not a "young" developer, but regardless of any research I simply prefer dark themes because I spend several hours every day staring at screens, and I find them so much easier on my eyes.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

Don't forget they were using CRTs and today most people use LCDs

I don't think one is necessarily better than the other "in general" but there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

- White background might be better on more illuminated environments. Too much contrast is bad

- Syntax highlighting is easier to resolve on a dark background

bregma3• 7 years ago

Syntax highlighting is easier to resolve on a dark background

Definitely an unsubstantiated claim.

throw0101a• 7 years ago

Ergonomics research has shown [...]

[citation needed]

I have no strong opinion on this subject, but I'd be interested in more data.

rofo1• 7 years ago

From personal experience: I use dark themes on everything for years, and the difference is night and day, literally.

Dark themes are much better for my eyes.

Having a hard time believing any research suggesting otherwise. Would surprise me, to say the least.

Also, this is anecdotal - I have 240Hz monitor, and since I started using it (couple of years), I have less eye strain. It could be the refresh rate, or it could be this particular monitor somehow (the quality or whatever). I am not sure.

Basically, 240Hz + dark background + light text + low brightness is ideal for my eyes, based on my experience.

meddlepal• 7 years ago

I find dark backgrounds and low brightness make floaters in my vision much less visible working on a computer. Please take your condescension and put it where it belongs.

adrusi• 7 years ago

I don't think people are making decisions about their UI colorschemes based on ergonomics. As a rule, people who say they use white-on-black or black-on-white for reasons of comfort or health are just rationalizing an aesthetic preference.

(n.b. I'm not weighing in on whether one white-on-black or black-on-white is more ergonomic, I'm just saying that it's rare that someone preference is actually grounded in ergonomics)

There's no shame in having an aesthetic preference, nor in sacrificing some ergonomics to realize it. If people always preferred ergonomics to aesthetics, everyone would be wearing New Balance shoes (I'm a happy owner of a pair). Your system UI and your code editor is something you stare at a lot, and it's reasonable to want it to look good.

bunderbunder3• 7 years ago

Ergonomics research has shown a long time ago that dark text on light background is easier to read on computer screens for long periods of time.

There are studies that have shown that in the lab. Meaning that it's worked out that way under whatever conditions were present in the lab, which aren't necessarily the same as the conditions in one's workplace. Real life is probably messier.

For example: https://www.maketecheasier.com/are-dark-themes-better-for-ey...

Shorel7• 7 years ago

Yet the opposite result was published as research when screens were CRT with green or orange screens.

I think dark text on a light background looks better in my Kobo. It is a device that looks great on a sunny day.

But I prefer light text on a dark background in Sublime Text when reading on the laptop screen. Different technologies, different light profiles.

Maybe what you want and need is an e-ink laptop screen.

zx2c4• 7 years ago

"I don’t know how to make a screenshot, because I normally use my computer in text-mode." --Richard Stallman

jl6• 7 years ago

I tend to hit print screen randomly every few weeks, and have been for a number of years. It’s like photography for when I’m not outside - it amounts to a near record of my ways of working over the years.

dev_dull2• 7 years ago

I used to do this too. For me they were only interesting until I started my career. Now those screenshots are just the default Mac background with a few apps hidden in the launch bar.

The things in person in real life, on the other hand, have become much more interesting!

bgeeek• 7 years ago

I'm sure there are other sites, but one that I follow: /r/unixporn on reddit.

rudiv2• 7 years ago

Some of those fonts make my head swim. I'm glad the quality of desktop typography has improved so much in the recent past. Also, I will always be scared of the people with strange cursive fonts like CmdrTaco. It's like people who use that comic sans-esque font that comes as a pre-installed option on Samsung phones.

userbinator• 7 years ago

It's like people who use that comic sans-esque font that comes as a pre-installed option on Samsung phones.

"I want to be different"... just like the millions of others who also choose that font.

yjftsjthsd-h• 7 years ago

Still less common than the default.

nurettin• 7 years ago

I love how some of them used Phoenix (earlier name of the firefox project). It was a fresh breath after netscape and explorer. Even the earliest versions supported multiple tabs, advanced CSS and adobe flash containers.

https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

cowmix• 7 years ago

Most are using the Mozilla browser it seems (like Luke Mewburn).

yegortimoshenko• 7 years ago

Huh, 5 out of 15 interviewed developers referred to their desktop as "boring".

scandox• 7 years ago

Yes the consensus is "pretty boring"

pbhjpbhj• 7 years ago

Surely that's right, a desktop should just keep out the way and let you work. The more boring the better?

JoeAltmaier• 7 years ago

Yes, I don't even customize mine. I leave the OS, tools in default configurations. I do my work in the cloud. If my computer is hit by lightening, I toss it in the dumpster and get another one. Back to work within an hour.

My toaster is also boring, and my pipe wrench, and my floor jack. Just tools.

kingofpandora• 7 years ago

Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP)

I assume that is a picture of PHP while it is being designed.

hestefisk• 7 years ago

I wish I could move desktop back in time to Gnome 1, gkrellm and Linux. So simple, yet so neat.

geggam2• 7 years ago

XFCE4 still runs like that. Personally I prefer a well configured Fluxbox

tambourine_man• 7 years ago

“Unix people” sounds like an archeological term to me, like the Clovis people.

AdmiralAsshat• 7 years ago

Richard Stallman:
I don’t know how to make a screenshot, because I normally use my computer in text-mode. I have X and GNOME installed, but I use them only occasionally.

I find it weird that the man is such a visionary in concept, but such a Luddite in actual day-to-day. Elsewhere, I've seen him explain that he still "views" most webpages by cURL'ing them and printing them to paper.

wipseabusbus• 7 years ago

And also icecat with tor https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 7 years ago

The older I get and the more I see how complicated and full of bullshit computing has become, the more I think he may have the right idea.

bunderbunder3• 7 years ago

Yeah, about the only bit there that gets me is the printing. But I'd be a happy camper if more webpages could be effectively used with `curl <url> | less`.

I also realize that it's difficult to make the kinds of social media inspired experiences™ that most consumers expect nowadays without some curl-breaking beast like React or Vue, and that most websites nowadays see themselves as an entertainment medium more often than they do a simple conduit for the transfer of information. I am beginning to think that that, too, speaks to what RMS is on about.

pradn2• 7 years ago

I was recently setting up my machine and figured I'd try 'mutt', the terminal mail reader. It's a pain to install and isn't great for HTML emails, but it sure is blazing fast and allows me to create custom macros that are really useful. Maybe if I stick with it, it'll be faster than GMail. But then again, after I set up some filters, my volume of email to look at in GMail was pretty low, so the performance advantages of 'mutt' are not as important now. It feels super cool though. We can't underestimate the aesthetic value of cool terminals.

awake• 7 years ago

He walks the walk and talks the talk. People may think he’s backwards or annoying but he’s consistently maintained his philosophy that software should be free. The fact that he has to use absurd measures to consume what everyone else does is a statement about the limitations of free software not a statement about his workflow preferences.

saas_sam2• 7 years ago

Does he think every written product should be free, or just software? Or is he just against paying people for their time?

sdegutis3• 7 years ago

It's good to live strictly by a philosophy, and I admire anyone who does this. I can't say I agree with Stallman's philosophy, because it places too high of an importance on communist principles which are inherently flawed and unjust.

There is nothing evil about closed-source software or proprietary licenses. Yes, it can be abused by greedy people, as can pretty much anything including water. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that all software must be open source as a step in humanity reaching its ultimate goal of perfection.

Shorel7• 7 years ago

He is just a professional contrarian. We are lucky he went against big software corporations and his contributions to Open Source licenses are groundbreaking.

But many others managed to provide screenshots while using free software.

He, a great man in many other ways, he is also backwards and annoying.

yeowMeng• 7 years ago

He is free to compute as he desires. He has worked a lifetime for that freedom. As for a luddite, he has enabled generations to forge new wild techno paths.. So literally the opposite of a luddite.

DesiLurker• 7 years ago

He is not paranoid, he's just setting an example of how the life's 'ought to' be without unnecessary corporate intervention. & I'd argue that he is doing so at a great personal cost so I am thankful to him for being as such, I do wish that he'd be a bit more creative in avoiding censorship/tracking in his day-to-day life.

loser777• 7 years ago

Quite the opposite; he likely does this because he is very mindful of what "viewing a webpage" actually entails and how much he is willing to identify himself. See "How I use the Internet" https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

DannyB2• 7 years ago

It is interesting how many of those screenshots include an open web browser.

catacombs3• 7 years ago

How is that interesting?

VectorLock• 7 years ago

I'm amused that jkh is browsing Jerkcity in his screenshot.

joezydeco• 7 years ago

Gotta wonder... We know Rands worked at Apple, and so did Hubbard. Is Hubbard the person behind Spigot?

sehugg• 7 years ago

The only IDE I see is TTimo from id using Anjunta: http://anjuta.org/

dba7dba• 7 years ago

Ahh. I was told by a CS student in 2005 or so that knowing just some Unix commands would get me a good job. I even took an introductory class based on this. But I never pursued it that diligently. And now 20 years later, I am learning Linux and plus many other related stuff. Should've listened to the recommendation 20 years earlier.

jlv2• 7 years ago

Jon Hall's desktop shows exmh running. I did a bunch of work on that long ago (90s). His two screenshots highlight two of my contributions (both of which live on today).

I wrote the folder display in the upper pane (I'm really proud of this result).

I also worked on the abomination of a 'pick' interface.

catacombs3• 7 years ago

Weird flex but OK.

jedberg• 7 years ago

Mine would look like Jordan Hubbard's, because by 2002 I'd replaced my Slack linux running fvwm with MacOS (on a Mac desktop I'd picked up for free from the e-waste bin at Berkeley!)

pradn2• 7 years ago

For screenshots of current *nix desktops from enthusiasts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn

neilv• 7 years ago

I did all sorts of desktop and window manager things over the years, but the last few years, I'm very happy with a tweaked tiling window manager with workspaces (currently based around XMonad).

All screen real estate is used for window content, except for a few pixels for borders. Currently no persistent panel or status display of any kind. I already known what workspace I'm on, based on the windows there, and I know what workspaces I've been using. When I need to see the clock, I've rigged a keypress to display it. I occasionally miss having system loadavg info displayed all the time, but I prefer using that screen real estate for an extra lines of code or text.

I've made a bunch of keybindings that start an application or switch focus to it if it's already running.

Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002 (2015)

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