On Desktop GUI Minimalism

https://mycophobia.org/desktop_gui_minimalism.html

by netdoll • 3 years ago

94 91 3 years ago

I think issues with attempts to redefine pc computing interfaces is that despite what is stated people are not actually starting from first principles when they go to redesign a personal computing GUI interface.

Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop".

The baggage of TTY interfaces in textual interfaces and the "desktop" paradigm for GUI interfaces is preventing people from going back to actual first principles for designing personal computing interfaces.

Of course I do appreciate that since the title of the articles is minimalist desktop GUIs the assumption of "first principles of computing assuming a desktop analog" is baked into the article, I just think it's insufficient.

sim7c00• 3 years ago

so agree that a lot is not going back, perhaps more just modifying whats there.

i think the first rule for me is: computers need to make things more simple for humans.

how we control our devices, how we use those controls to do things (like interact with these guis), currentlt the model makes things always difficult and practically ensures people lose immersion of their real life into some device screen and controlscheme.

tldr i guess; u can optimise guis etc. but if you dont change the interface to those guis its not reinventing anything. these things work in concert to generate the users experience.

rollcat2• 3 years ago

Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop".

Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster.

There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites:

- Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in!

- SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years.

- Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick.

- Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback.

- ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route.

- Magit (https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful.

Smartphone UIs are non-desktop metaphors? They sure seem like a desktop metaphor to me, albeit a very tiny desktop.

layer82• 3 years ago

There isn’t really a lot of alternatives to the "desktop", since it basically just means arranging stuff within a rectangle, and what else would you do on a rectangular screen? The only alternatives are having everything fullscreen, like TUIs, or else tiling windows, so that you never see the actual desktop. Similar for folders. You need a way to visually represent groupings of stuff, and there isn’t a lot of choice besides lists/menus or a two-dimensional layout of proxy items (usually labelled icons).

I think we already found out what works best for monitor+mouse+keyboard 20-ish years ago. There's a lot to improve in terms of consistency and various details, but I don’t think there's any new paradigm to be found that would work better.

pengaru• 3 years ago

That's quite the wall of text I won't be reading...

MrVandemar2• 3 years ago

Put it in reader-mode and up the line-height. Much improved.

bluepoint3• 3 years ago

Cool insights in Desktop! I really hope that someone comes up with a desktop metaphor for the hundreds of open browser tabs (which I think are the new bookmarks) that hang open in an endless horizontal list. Imagine tabs which are like documents, can be moved around, minimized, and spatially organized in folders and subfolders. Actually, why does this not exist somehow?

somnic• 3 years ago

There's an extension for firefox called Tree Style Tabs. I never really got into it but some people are quite enthusiastic, pretty similar to what you describe though.

bluepoint3• 3 years ago

This sounds interesting. I will check it out.

pacifika• 3 years ago

Many people have thousands of bookmarks

vladxyz• 3 years ago

Also see something like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...

ssnepenthe• 3 years ago

It may not be exactly what you have in mind but there is an interesting extension along similar lines (mostly for chrome) called TabFS that mounts your open tabs as a filesystem...

https://omar.website/tabfs/

bluepoint3• 3 years ago

That is impressive. I am wondering if it can be included in some desktop gui. Thanks for pointing it out.

torstenvl• 3 years ago

TLDR: How to hack MATE to get window shading and spatial file management à la MacOS 9.

Decently cool and interesting, but not worth the hour-long read IMHO.

Animats• 3 years ago

I never got past the "get off my lawn" part.

Try some 3D creation tools, such as Autodesk Fusion or Blender. Those face a really hard problem. It took too many years to get 3D CAD and drawing up to a tolerable level. Selection in a cluttered 3D environment took a long time to solve. Most user-level GUIs are addressing a far simpler problem.

I'd just like to have borders back. They don't have to be big, or shadowed. Just present. I'm tired of overlapping borderless consoles in Ubuntu. Of web sites where there's a scrollable area with no border. Multiple scrollable areas with no border, as with Discord. Buttons with no indication of the live area. This stuff is borrowed from phones, but does not scale well to larger screens and more controls.

MrVandemar2• 3 years ago

Interesting article, and the author makes some excellent points (especially about the pernicious encroachment of "touch" interfaces for systems that are fundamentally driven by keyboard and mouse on large screens) but they start with speculating about starting from scratch for desktop paradigms and ends up:

What I have now is a reasonable facsimile of the classic Mac OS UI functionality in Linux, minus little niceties like the aforementioned popup folders, and I've found that I need basically nothing beyond that to work incredibly efficiently.

While it's one of the killer features of linux that you have enormous flexibility in how you use it and set it up, the screen-shot gives me the heebie-jeebies. Visually it's too noisy. I couldn't concentrate with that clutter screaming in my face.

Nb: I'm a i3 + command-line guy.

colordrops3• 3 years ago

Speaking of minimalist desktops, I'm really loving the unix-y philosophy behind sway/i3/hyprland/xmonad. Instead of an integrated desktop environment, you start with the simple window manager (Sway in my case), and pick and choose the tools you need for various things, such as a status bar, notifications, launcher, etc. Unless you really trick it out, there is usually very little on your screen other than the apps you are working with, as these window managers are primarly keyboard driven.

Furthermore, I use the tiling functionality heavily. There are about 10 apps I use regularly, and they launch and get bound to a particular workspace on startup. My screen remains uncluttered, with one app filling the viewport, and a single keystroke to switch to the other apps I use. It's pretty close to perfect for my use cases.

Lastly, these WMs are all configured through text files, so your exact configuration can be stored in dot files in git. In my case I use Nix, so I can redeploy my exact setup on any machine without any manual configuration.

bryceneal• 3 years ago

Interesting. I've been considering toying around with something similar using i3 and Nix. I hadn't considered binding certain applications to various workspaces, but I like that idea as well.

I'm curious if there are any particular guides/examples you would recommend, or whether your Nix config is open source somewhere?

0x38B2• 3 years ago

Sway is fast, minimal, and flexible. Their recommended tools/addons are worth a look: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway

From that list I use greetd + tuigreet as my login manager, sway-launcher-desktop for FZF-powered app launching, and wob for lightweight brightness and volume display (send '50' to the wob socket and it'll show 50%; it doesn't get simpler).

globular-toast2• 3 years ago

sway (and i3 at work as I'm forced to use X, although this pales in comparison to the author's dire situation) are perfect. I've written several simple text based blocks for i3blocks that makes my DE somehow more functional than the bloated ones. It's just so great getting exactly what you want because you write/compose it yourself (yes, I use emacs).

Stumpwm is also very attractive. Less "Unixy" but more Lispy which is a different approach at getting exactly what you want.

Jedd• 3 years ago

All computing up to the point of its [Apple Mac] introduction, at least from the "shell" standpoint of launching programs and managing files, was done exclusively through typing commands at the computer; you effectively had to program it, to a degree. The creators of the first Macintosh had the mouse, the desktop metaphor, and the menubar, and did their damnedest to make sure the user of their new paradigm-shifting computer ...

The wording has some ambiguity, but it does sound like TFA hasn't heard of Xerox or Perq - perhaps attributing some misplaced invention, rather than popularisation, to Apple.

Subsequently reinforced my suspicion:

The spirit of the Macintosh spread throughout all of computing; the GUI was inexorably the future.

I think with desktop minimalism there's two broad interpretations - a desktop metaphor that is simple (has (frustratingly) few features), versus one that is complex but can be configured to be simple to operate.

I like the fact I can very precisely adjust the width and colour of my window borders, but it's not a configuration item I visit more than once every few years, so I wouldn't say the option adds to the complexity of the interface. (Disclaimer - I've never used MATE.)

Oddly enough, only GNOME has had any kind of distinct vision

The author did use KDE early on (version 3, but says they've only been using a computer for a decade and change).

They're aware of other desktops, then, including the one that's arguably put the most effort into having a consistent user experience.

The discussion on navigating through minimised windows I think boils down to a consideration of how to represent complexity - similarly their discussion of the launcher - almost inevitably a hierarchy is required if we are aiming to 'avoid the keyboard at all costs'. People have different GUI preferences there - mine is generally narrow and deep, over wide and shallow.

netdoll6• 3 years ago

The wording has some ambiguity, but it does sound like TFA hasn't heard of Xerox or Perq - perhaps attributing some misplaced invention, rather than popularisation, to Apple.

The way I read it, they were attributing the intercombination of these elements under the desktop metaphor to Apple. Smalltalk existed, the Star existed, PERQ existed, the Lisp Machine GUIs existed and JERQ/Blit existed, but all of these were so substantially different from each other let alone what Apple did that they functionally exerted little influence on the way GUIs developed after the Macintosh launched save for a few odd branches here and there (Oberon anyone?)

BwackNinja2• 3 years ago

MacOS 9 and the spatial desktop metaphor is neat. I went that route for a while. What this misses, however, is that the biggest problem with the desktop interface is that we've substantially increased application complexity and laptops (and even smaller devices) won. As a result, we're trying to answer the question "how we fit our skeuomorphic paradigm in a diminutive form factor". The inspiration involved much larger actual desks and tables where you can freely arrange several documents that are each visible and can be reached at a glance. If you're maximizing the window for a document for reasons beyond helping you focus, then your workspace ahem your screen is too small.

The screenshot is 1920x1080. Screens are sold using buzzwords like 'HD', 'UHD', and 'retina' that evoke a sense of image clarity. I spent years telling my dad that I liked higher resolutions because it meant more /space/ and he couldn't grasp what I meant. He was stuck on associating higher resolution with clarity until I bought him a 43" 4k monitor, and he used it for a while. Even at 1.5x scaling, suddenly, he was able to view multiple pages of a document clearly at the same time without even scrolling. This isn't at all a normal desktop setup or the kind of setup that desktop environments are optimizing for or advocating. But it works better and better matches the inspiration.

alwayslikethis2• 3 years ago

For many people, the limiting factor of this is visual acuity though. I personally can't see it useful to have more than 2560x1440 equivalent pixels of space on a 27 inch monitor. For a larger monitor, you have to sit further back, so it is effectively the same. If you want to see more clearly, you'd need to get closer, but that causes issues since you are still limited by your available field of view.

shric2• 3 years ago

I'd probably agree with the "useful" but I find higher resolution more aesthetically pleasing, especially text.

0x4454422• 3 years ago

It’s interesting you mention this. The way I use my desktop I always have my applications maximized and I just alt-tab to switch contexts. I also am in the terminal a lot and use Yaquake but not in maximized mode because I don’t want to focus in the bottom left corner of my screen. I also put the task bar left vertical because I don’t care about the horizontal space.

Doing all of this still felt cumbersome and then it dawned on me about a year ago, because I don’t game or watch full screen video, I think I’d much prefer the old 4x3 screens for my workflow.

BwackNinja2• 3 years ago

Requiring that you sit further back is built on the notion that you need to be able to see your entire workspace at once, which was never true with an actual desk and largely implies that you want a single document to take up the whole screen. If you remove that limitation, then you find yourself with a larger workspace with elements at a comfortable size to work with.

I do prefer to turn my head side to side rather than up and down, so right now I'm happiest with a 5120x1440 49" monitor and may consider a 7680x2160 57" monitor sometime in the future.

im_down_w_otp• 3 years ago

The 9” B&W screen on my SE/30 with a 512x384 resolution is perfectly usable for Word, Excel, IRC, and code editing.

Refreshingly so at times. Comparatively it’s very distraction free.

Whenever I fire it up to journal or fiddle with some classic MacOS development I always think, “Where did we manage to go so wrong in the last 30 years?”

netdoll6• 3 years ago

This is where the classic Mac OS really shines: one fullscreen application which is totally dedicated to the task at hand. It's why I still favor it for many "creative" endeavors and why Apple was able to survive so relatively long with it despite the OS being a flaming garbage pile of technical debt and hacks underneath the glossy exterior.

vidarh2• 3 years ago

For me, I look back to the Amiga for this. Most actual work happened on individual screens, which match neatly to mostly tiled virtual desktops set up for individual tasks.

It was mostly on the Workbench we used floating windows, and while we had "sort-of" spatial, in that the position of windows were remembered if you chose, the if you chose (by choosing "snapshot") part meant you were free to move folder around knowing they'd be back where they should be when you opened them again. To me it's always been annoying that the attempts at spatial on Linux all took it to the extreme of remembering every change, which to me was always the biggest wart of these systems.

I absolutely like expanding screen size, and can't deal with peoples tendency to opt for tiny little laptops, but at the same time, I don't need all that much physical screen space for most things because everything happens on separate "screens"/virtual desktops the way it used to back on my Amiga.

Avshalom• 3 years ago

It's a shame that rox filer is functionally dead and the rox desktop ecosystem (small as it was) is even dead-er I think author would have enjoyed it.

netdoll6• 3 years ago

ROX is one of those things which is great except for the ecosystem it tied itself to. I would love to see a Wayland rewrite one day, or something using the same concepts. Or really anything that isn't r/unixporn tile rice #9001

sillywalk• 3 years ago

You can run RiscOS on a Raspberry Pi. It's what's rox is based on I believe.

RiscOS is quite nice to use, but it is .. limited. No wifi for instance. And the filesystem uses . (dots) for folder separators, so xfering files can be a pain.

bstar775• 3 years ago

Two years ago, I transitioned to a minimalist tiling window manager (WM) despite my initial reservations about them. This change was prompted by my desire to experiment with high-end hardware and a 4K multi-monitor setup in a tiled environment. Surprisingly, the switch turned out to be a game-changer, boosting my productivity significantly, with around 90% of my tasks now occurring in the terminal. Traditional criticisms of terminals, such as memorization challenges and lack of guidance, no longer apply, thanks to modern features like auto-completion, interactive history, suggestions, and plugins like Git integration. Unfortunately, the reluctance to embrace this minimalist, terminal-centric approach may hinder power users from unlocking its full potential due to long-standing biases and a fear of change.

Skyywalker• 3 years ago

Which terminal app do you use? It sounds like one I would like to try. Thank you.

netdoll6• 3 years ago

I believe most of the things OP mentioned have to do with the shell and not the terminal. At the very least, most of the things thus mentioned can be configured in zsh (I don't know how, as I haven't looked into it really)

bstar775• 3 years ago

This is what my desktop looks like: https://i.imgur.com/Mo9ku4W.png https://i.imgur.com/pq3fwBk.png

I use Kitty for my terminal, i3 for my window manager, vifm for my file manager, vim/neovim for my editor and Firefox. All of my virtual desktops handle different things, like watching movies, doing AI projects, web work, game development, graphics work, etc.

You can do all of this stuff in Windows or on a Mac, but I'm using minimal resources with a highly streamlined workflow. Everything that I can script, I script. I also use Zsh with quite a few plugins so the terminal itself isn't so important. I use Kitty because it's fast, can render graphics, is well documented and has a ton of features.

kaba05• 3 years ago

boosting my productivity significantly

With all due respect, I can never take these self-made claims at face value. You definitely feel that you are more productive, but that may or may not be the actual case and it is easy to lie to ourselves.

colordrops3• 3 years ago

That's true of virtually every comment making a claim on HN. Unless you've done a scientific experiment and collected data, you want know for sure.

In any case I'll add another anecdote for someone that has nearly the identical setup to the GP and will say it also significantly increased my productivity. Don't really care if anyone believes me.

DyslexicAtheist• 3 years ago

I've been on a similar quest but my purpose was to eliminate distraction, and becoming more productive was just a side-effect.

i3 (actually sway) helps me with focusing only at those windows that belong to a specific task, and often in full-screen. if I must use a GUI browser which has tabs and constant distraction then I can do so, but the context switch isn't "just mental" but I have to change over to another virtal desktop. this sounds hardly revolutionary (virtual desktops are also in KDE and Gnome). But it is a lot more "painful" than having everything in front of me at all times using 3 monitors. It also makes me actively aware (!!) that a context switch is happening, and so I end up allowing it less, and force myself to finish what I'm doing before attending to some interruption. there is no taskbar no dbus-popups.

I even use my device for undistracted reading of books multiple hours at the time, without snacking on HN content inbetween. (although for this I've started using another cheap old laptop that does not have network and is only running a few things (zathura for reading PDF's and calibre for converting from different formats). -> hardware compartmentalization FTW

generally leaving fullscreen and reconnecting the network and switching to another desktop is just too many steps and i now only break my concentration with a total awareness of it happening.

It honestly changed my life, made me more focused, less anxious, and more in control. Def not going back to the illusion of being productive just because I'm juggling everything at once ...

bstar775• 3 years ago

When I pair with other developers the difference is obvious. Being able to work efficiently in a complex environment is a skill that not many have unfortunately.

40yearoldman2• 3 years ago

Minimal desktops are productivity boosters. On top of that ones that can be controlled by keyboard input are super important.

99% of the time you just want information. Text. The chrome does not matter. Yet modern desktops and web pages make humans hunt and pick through poorly designed interfaces to get the info we need.

I use EXWM. It’s a time saver. I have no desktop because I am either using the full screen for a single application or flip flopping between a few apps that share the entire screen. This means every pixel of the screen is used and not wasted on useless images of empty fields.

In top of that I am able to designate windows and frames for specific jobs or functions, always able to recall the last terminal or most relevance.

We fucked up with movable windows. They are inefficient complicated and bring little value over a simple list of activities to switch between.

jwells892• 3 years ago

I believe this is kind of thing is highly subjective as well as dependent on hardware. Point in case fullscreening anything but an IDE or graphics editor on a 27"+ monitor drives me crazy because most things don't make good use of the extra space. Similarly I find tiled smaller windows irritating because they often size themselves incorrectly, ironically making for more manual window twiddling and micromanagement than I'd be doing with a boring old floating window manager.

40yearoldman2• 3 years ago

Tiling -- split left and right or up and down... This is the case within in Emacs.

Given I use a much larger screen I can assure you it works well.

kaba05• 3 years ago

just want information. Text

Text is a not an information-dense medium, and for many kind of data it simply sucks.

Also, please don’t just go around throwing productivity into sentences, it is just completely baseless and biased observation on your own part - if you better enjoy a new workflow, but it is actually slower, you might still feel more “productive”.

abwizz• 3 years ago

Text is a not an information-dense medium

true, but the api is very stable

anthk• 3 years ago

I used to use Emacs for everything, even Telega and SICP. But... elfeed and GNU's are damn slow compared to the opposite approach: Unix, sfeed, lynx -dump for inline HTML info, castget, mutt, msmtp, isync, slrn and amused/mpv. MuPDF and sxiv for media. That's it, plus some CLI gemini/gopher browser.

And, yes, I managed to bind slrnpull with GNU's avoiding a huge chunk of time. And, SLRN was much faster. On hackability, I don't care, awk/sed/sh it's my glue, and perl+CPAN for a big task.

In the end, it's being run on a batch basis with cron, so I have the ultimate Unix tools: let the tools do the hard work themselves with scripts, so you just ignore anything else and focus on your current task. Mails, news posts and RSS's are currently managed in the background, a single script will download and upload all the data.

GlenTheMachine• 3 years ago

I recently ran across helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/), which has as its hook the idea that we should base a unified desktop environment around the original Macintosh user interface guidelines. And while it's still pretty rough around the edges, it has FreeBSD underneath and I'm cautiously hopeful that it will turn into a useable desktop.

0x38B2• 3 years ago

Shortly thereafter my family gained access to broadband internet and I was able to delve into Linux again, this time thankfully without obliterating my computer's access to the outside world.

As a teenager, my first experience with Linux (a Fedora book & CD combo) was formatting my main Windows drive with all my data on it. Good times.

et1337• 3 years ago

There’s no accounting for taste… I disagreed with just about every single preference the author expressed. Which challenges my normal wishful thinking, which is that somewhere out there is a perfect GUI that satisfies everyone’s needs.

vidarh2• 3 years ago

I find it kind of funny that they see Mate and Caja as a good basis for something minimalist. I just transitioned off Caja to a homegrown "file manager" that is so basic it makes Caja seem like a swiss army knife. Largely because of all my virtual desktops only one uses floating windows, and don't need many features for it, but the features I care about I want to be able to tune exactly how I want them, and it was easier to write something from scratch than "fixing" Caja. And by "fixing" Caja I mean tuning the "spatial" aspects that it seems most desktop environments have lost interest in.

On the minimalist side, we're all bikeshedding, and the biggest challenge is that there are more theories about what a nice interface should be like than there are users...

rtz121• 3 years ago

That's not a good background color. Very hard to read.

globular-toast2• 3 years ago

I'm so lucky that I get to tinker with Linux, Emacs etc in my free time and then actually use those tools for work. It's like having a hobby car and then getting paid to drive it around. If you love tinkering with computers too then do avoid taking golden handcuffs tying you to a Windows job. It's just so much more fulfilling to make things that are actually useful.

nirui• 3 years ago

As a Gnome 40+ user for the past three years, and before that, XFCE and Awesome WM, based on my experience... NONE of these desktop/WM managed to resolve cluttering.

Awesome WM gives you an organized clutter if you opened too many windows that's not bare-minimum terminals, while XFCE with all it's window UI elements made the clutter even worse (but you can just minimize the window). The new Gnome just made it so that opening more than three windows under the same workspace gives you nightmares due to lack of a dock as well as minimize buttons.

(Now, to clarify, I had good experiences with all the desktop/wms mentioned above, so it's not a criticize, more of pointing out my desires)

If you take a look at the screenshot presented in the article, I don't really think it's a productive desktop any more because it takes at least 5 seconds to find the window that you wanted. I mean, I'm sure MATE has tried it's best there, but... I think we are all limited by the lack of imagination of how a good desktop should be like.

For me, I resolved my clutter problems by installing a Dock extension as well as (most importantly, actually) adding an external monitor. So finally I can comfortably open more than 6 windows at a time :) (Yep, I keep the tree windows that I wanted on the main monitor and throw the rest of clutters to the second one :)

errantmind• 3 years ago

I even briefly used a tiling window manager before very quickly returning to the floating ones; the appeal of such utterly inflexible window management I will simply never understand.

The author mentions this design in passing but I think it is contextually important to understand why people might like this at all so I'll share what I appreciate about tiling window managers:

The appeal, for me, is the inflexibility. Tiling window managers and their often bundled 'tags' approach to window management offer a simplicity that is comforting in its constancy to me, the user. To sum it up, they make me feel 'at home' using my computer. Comfy goes beyond familiarity though.

I never have a mess of windows to deal with across my monitors, where I'm constantly needing to look at a taskbar, minimizing and un-minimizing programs (or looking through a stack of 'shaded' windows in the author's case). Each of my frequently used programs has its own tag, or shares a tag (visually as a tile) with other programs. While the programs I have open at any one time change, their locations don't. Everything in its right place, I always know what is where. I switch between all programs directly with ease, with no intermediate interruptions to occupy my attention, my hands never leaving my keyboard. No 'looking' for stuff. Switches happen instantly because there are no transitions or any other forms of detectable latency (and for that matter, no compositor either). Combine all this with extensive use of scratchpads for ad-hoc and exploratory tasks and all the bases have been covered. Comfy.

walteweiss• 3 years ago

I remember I used Aston on Windows XP back in the day. All of my programs were assigned to their hot keys and I never left my keyboard. On top of that it ate less ram than a regular explorer.exe of Windows!

A couple of decades later, I went through so many macOS versions, Windows 7,8,10 and different Gnome/KDE/Xfce etc., to find out just recently (well, a couple of years by now) that sway wm (or i3wm for X11) is a thing. What a relief! I’m back into old calm days with no eternal switching and multitasking that takes so much of my attention, giving nothing in return. God, I wish I knew about that much much earlier! When I left Windows for good, that was the only thing I missed so much! Now I enjoy that and 300 MB of occupied ram out of my 16 or 32 GB setups. Would highly recommend to any nerd like me!

sph• 3 years ago

Tiling is not great, but I believe is better than floating window managers. Yet neither are good enough in 2023.

In floating systems, partially covered windows are useless and usually avoided: either you want to see everything, or you minimize the window. The few times one tries to actually keep a partially covered window (i.e. show only the last few lines of a terminal visible), the UX is terrible because as soon as you switch focus the visibility of the entire stack of windows changes, and you need to click around/Alt-Tab to restore the previous layout. For this reason, 99% of people just have a single window that's maximized per workspace.

Tiling window managers could be decent if they were a core experience, but in reality no one develops apps for them so you always have some popup that spawns and fills half your screen.

The major shortcoming of both is that they only work in rectangular, desktop-sized screens. Mobile UIs avoid both, and default to single-window-always-maximized, which still isn't good enough.

Scrollable tiling managers, however, would be the bee's knees: windows are laid out on an infinitely scrollable horizontal layout, which would also easily replicate the common side-by-side layout "power users" often rely on. There are some niche experiments like PaperWM, but they haven't ironed out the UX for some reason: if they just made the entire layout scrollable by panning on your touchpad/mobile screen, it would instantly be better than anything we have today, and free us from the tyranny of window management. Additionally, it would work with both our widescreen, cinema-sized desktop monitors, and mobile devices.

(I have never used it and memory might fail me, but I seem to remember Palm webOS devices had this scrollable "card" layout system which people seemed to like a lot. See https://www.palmtotal.com/sites/www.palmtotal.com/files/imag...)

hackeraccount• 3 years ago

I remember using some X11 windowmanager way back with desktop resolution higher then the the monitor. If you put the cursor on an edge it would scroll over.

It was surprisingly nice but in retrospect a bit too mouse heavy.

I've since gone over to tiling. Sway in particular.

mst3• 3 years ago

The few times one tries to actually keep a partially covered window (i.e. show only the last few lines of a terminal visible), the UX is terrible because as soon as you switch focus the visibility of the entire stack of windows changes

"pop window to front on focus" is a choice - in fvwm2 by default it doesn't happen, you need to click the window decoration to bring one to the front and can focus it just fine without doing so.

I use focus follows mouse as well so all I have to do is put the cursor over wherever I currently want to type into, but while I personally think the combination of the two is more than the sum of its parts, 'windows stay put Z-order wise' is great on its own too.

Scrollable tiling managers, however, would be the bee's knees: windows are laid out on an infinitely scrollable horizontal layout, which would also easily replicate the common side-by-side layout "power users" often rely on.

I have a small script called xclus (https://trout.me.uk/X11/xclus) that fires up my xterms pre-tiled and scroll around them - including sometimes borrowing the left hand pair of the screen's worth to the right to end up having six dedicated to a task rather than four. Looks a like https://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png in practice, look at the pager at the bottom to see the pre-tiled ones that I can scroll across to.

layer82• 3 years ago

In a very similar vein, on Windows I use WindowManager [0] to always open windows in the same position, based on application and/or window title. There's a global keyboard shortcut to save the size and position of the current window, so that it’s automatically restored to that same size and position the next time (and every subsequent time) it is opened. For many applications, using that keyboard shortcut once is enough, but one can define more sophisticated criteria in the configuration dialog. This basically provides the same benefits as described by the parent.

I don't like tiling window managers, because I want most windows to be roughly centered in my field of view, and also vertically maximized. Actually, what I really want to be centered is the relevant contents of each window, which generally isn’t the same as centering the window itself, due to sidebars and other application-specific layout vagaries. Hence the necessity to save size and position per application. I also rarely need to see multiple windows simultaneously side-by-side. Having the windows centered and full size (if not full screen) trumps the drawback of having to press Alt+Tab or other keyboard shortcuts to switch between them.

[0] https://www.desksoft.com/WindowManager.htm

hawkguy• 3 years ago

On my Mac I use a combination of floating windows (I use Spectacle to snap them around), Cmd+Tab to scroll through open applications, and Spotlight search to open new applications. Hands never leave the keyboard to find/open the window I want and it feels very comfortable to me.

The main drawback is that I absolutely never see my desktop background, but that’s about it.

mst3• 3 years ago

I have an infinite number of separate workspaces, each arranged in their own way. I like being able to see and have at-hand everything at once on one screen, which is an illusion best maintained, for me, by a single desktop. Even more than one monitor is more of an "immersion-breaker" than I care to mentally deal with.

I feel exactly the same way but solve it by having an fvwm2 configuration that makes my workspace 3x3 (currently) of the physical screen size and I can scroll the viewport around that to taste.

See https://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc for my configuration if curious (for a more actual-GUI-ish workflow you'd want to configure more of its features, I generally just have lots of xterms and maybe a firefox - see https://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png)

Wowfunhappy• 3 years ago

An application launcher menu would simply be a folder you open like any other, containing launchers. Open the folder, size and shape it how you want, put it in whatever view style you want, and stick it somewhere on your screen.

The author is not taking the metaphor far enough! He left out one of my favorite pieces of Mac OS.

The folder should not contain application launchers. It should contain the actual applications themselves. An application is just a file. To "install" an application, copy the file to a location on your hard drive. To "uninstall" an application, delete the file.

Under the hood, applications can be a collection of files, whatever, but the GUI should treat each application as one file.

netdoll6• 3 years ago

It's not mentioned in the article, but the author uses AppImages for GUI applications wherever and whenever he can. He's very well aware of this aspect of the classic Mac OS and seeks to emulate it as closely as possible.

On Desktop GUI Minimalism

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