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Vim is a perfect example of an insanely terrible user interface. That we all use it because it is powerful and also a shibboleth into devops/sysops/developers m

Vim is a perfect example of an insanely terrible user interface. That we all use it because it is powerful and also a shibboleth into devops/sysops/developers minds doesn't make it a good idea. It's just very convenient and powerful while also being the height of nerd cred. Also the OP is right from an objective POV, the Blender UI is absolutely brutal. I use a lot of tools in this industry for my job but my job is not specifically 3d work, so I am not expected to have deep mastery of any of the tools nor does it even help me, really. This is where a decent UI that is intuitive and helpful is important, and Blender for my colleagues and myself is practically unusable out of the box. It is, however, a great piece of software, as you all say. I totally agree there. But good lord the UI is horrific.

nicoburns 8y ago
Even with this new update?
Joeboy 8y ago
You've just described a subjective POV.
tjoff 8y ago
> and Blender for my colleagues and myself is practically unusable out of the box. You are confusing beginner friendly with user friendly. User friendly UIs are most often terrible for experts and expert UIs often have some learning curve. That said, I can not name a single application that has a better user interface than Blender. It is a masterpiece and I am in complete awe of whatever process and the people that created it.
- iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
  Could you please identify the difference between beginner friendly and user friendly for me? I’m not convinced that there is one.
  - Joeboy 8y ago
    As in, you've never heard of it and suspect they've just made it up, or you're aware of the concept but have an unorthodox opinion about it? It's a very pervasive concept among UX people. If the former, try googling "learnability vs usability" or somesuch?
  - fao_ 8y ago
    "User Friendly" depends on the type of tasks that the user intends to accomplish, and the frequency of those tasks. The things that expert users intend to do are not necessarily the same things that beginner users intend to do. Essentially it is about the path-of-resistance between you and your goal. A beginner friendly UI might do X, Y, and Z. But complex tasks like scheduling X, Y, and Z, automating them based on other events, or even performing them rapidly in sequence, are likely to be given a higher path of resistance.
  - andybak 8y ago
    The key term to search for is "discoverabilty" although there are other important factors at play
  - jolmg 8y ago
    I think vim is user friendly but beginner unfriendly. For whatever task I want to do with text, vim will provide the easiest way to achieve it. However, to anyone that is not experienced with it, it will be the hardest way to achieve it. To put another way, it probably takes a couple minutes to learn and be proficient in windows notepad, and a couple months to learn and be proficient in vim. However, for a task that may take a couple months in notepad, it might take a couple of minutes in vim. I take beginner-friendly to be a more specific form of user-friendlyness. The usefulness of the concept is that it's common to see a UX and say it's not user-friendly, because it's not beginner-friendly. However, not all users are beginners. To someone that is proficient in both vim and notepad, vim is more user-friendly than notepad, because it is more friendly to him, the user, since it allows the completion of any task far easier.
- viraptor 8y ago
  > User friendly UIs are most often terrible for experts and expert UIs often have some learning curve. You don't have to choose one or the other, it just takes time to make it right for both. Word is a good example example. You want to type some text? It's easy. You want to format it? Click the icons that look relevant. You do it often? Keyboard shortcuts are available for everything. You want to do typesetting? Styles are available, but not enforced. You want to automate things? Integrated programming environment is waiting for you. And almost every action has its own page in the manual. Simple things are simple, tooltips and icons provide discoverability, and you can head to the manual for expert content. This is totally not how blender pre-2.8 works where the discoverability almost doesn't exist.
  - Joeboy 8y ago
    Most of what you just said about Word (tooltips, keyboard shortcuts, icons, programming environment) is also true of Blender. But I don't really know what the equivalent of "just type some text" would be in Blender.
    - viraptor 8y ago
      Blender has the shortcuts and programming environment, but lacked the icons/tooltips in many cases. Many existing tooltips listed only what the button mapped to in the python environment.
      - Joeboy 8y ago
        Looking at Blender 2.79 right now, a comfortable 90% of icons, buttons etc have tooltips with useful (if terse) text. Some buttons are text instead of icons, but that's also true of Word. I don't doubt Word is more discoverable, partly because of Microsoft's resources and partly because word processing is fundamentally more accessible than 3D modelling. But by the metrics you're talking about, Blender is maybe 75-90% as good. Which I don't think is the same as "discoverability almost doesn't exist".
        8y ago
mikekchar 8y ago
I often find that people conflate ease of use with ease of learning. Both Vim and Blender are very easy to use. Blender is astonishingly easy to use, in fact. I've been using it for video editing and it's ridiculously more efficient than anything else I've ever used. Both Vim and Blender are very hard to learn and discovery is extremely poor. There is just no way to figure it out without reading the manual. Even after you read the manual, you have to practice it frequently to get good at it. After that it's a dream. I don't really like characterising a UI as "good" or "bad" in a one dimensional perspective, because whether I will choose an easy to use or an easy to learn application depends entirely on what I'm going to be doing. For example, with video editing (and also code editing), I'm doing the same actions over and over and over and over again. I'm also combining actions in different ways and I want a kind of "UI grammar" that lets me efficiently express myself without searching around for some drop down or macro. I use these tools for hours on end, day after day. I don't really care about ease of learning -- I only care about easy of use and efficiency. For other things, I really care about ease of use. For example, I make New Years cards once a year. I want some software that helps me make a mailing list, print an image without screwing about, etc, etc. I don't want to spend more than about 30 seconds setting it. It needs to be intuitive. If anyone knows of such a thing for Gnu/Linux, I'd be very happy ;-). Frequently ease of use and efficiency are at odds with ease of learning. Best if you can do both, but often you have to compromise. Both Vim and Blender compromise a lot, but they are aiming at a particular niche. Not everybody likes them, but those that do love them. Some other applications compromise in other ways, and at least for my applications I don't find them appropriate. YMMV.
- gregmac 8y ago
  I really like the contrast of ease of use vs ease of learning. However, I don't think designing an interface that is good for both is fundamentally difficult. The problem comes from evolution. In early versions, with only a few features, none of this requires a ton of thought. As features are added, it's rare that an overall UX re-design is undertaken, for a few reasons. For one, the people working on it and using it day to day are incrementally learning changes, and have time to adjust. In some cases they probably don't even notice the UX learning curve problem as it takes time to become apparent. For two, existing and power users will freak out if a new release changes shortcut keys or otherwise "moves the cheese". Think of the outrage if vim were to announce "we're changing all the commands to be fully consistent with each other, but it means every command you've spent years memorizing is now incorrect. Even for the most UX-focused team it's impossible to predict the feature set a product will have in 1, 2, or 5 years, so of course by the time you get there, the UX has issues.
InGodsName 8y ago
I'll give worst user interface to git.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  And I'll raise you CVS.
  - webmaven 8y ago
    RCS.
ilaksh 8y ago
Vim has modes because key combinations didn't exist on that computer it was invented on and neither did cursor keys. It was a decent design for the original context.

nicoburns 8y ago

Even with this new update?

Joeboy 8y ago

You've just described a subjective POV.

tjoff 8y ago

> and Blender for my colleagues and myself is practically unusable out of the box. You are confusing beginner friendly with user friendly. User friendly UIs are most often terrible for experts and expert UIs often have some learning curve. That said, I can not name a single application that has a better user interface than Blender. It is a masterpiece and I am in complete awe of whatever process and the people that created it.

iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
Could you please identify the difference between beginner friendly and user friendly for me? I’m not convinced that there is one.
- Joeboy 8y ago
  As in, you've never heard of it and suspect they've just made it up, or you're aware of the concept but have an unorthodox opinion about it? It's a very pervasive concept among UX people. If the former, try googling "learnability vs usability" or somesuch?
- fao_ 8y ago
  "User Friendly" depends on the type of tasks that the user intends to accomplish, and the frequency of those tasks. The things that expert users intend to do are not necessarily the same things that beginner users intend to do. Essentially it is about the path-of-resistance between you and your goal. A beginner friendly UI might do X, Y, and Z. But complex tasks like scheduling X, Y, and Z, automating them based on other events, or even performing them rapidly in sequence, are likely to be given a higher path of resistance.
- andybak 8y ago
  The key term to search for is "discoverabilty" although there are other important factors at play
- jolmg 8y ago
  I think vim is user friendly but beginner unfriendly. For whatever task I want to do with text, vim will provide the easiest way to achieve it. However, to anyone that is not experienced with it, it will be the hardest way to achieve it. To put another way, it probably takes a couple minutes to learn and be proficient in windows notepad, and a couple months to learn and be proficient in vim. However, for a task that may take a couple months in notepad, it might take a couple of minutes in vim. I take beginner-friendly to be a more specific form of user-friendlyness. The usefulness of the concept is that it's common to see a UX and say it's not user-friendly, because it's not beginner-friendly. However, not all users are beginners. To someone that is proficient in both vim and notepad, vim is more user-friendly than notepad, because it is more friendly to him, the user, since it allows the completion of any task far easier.
viraptor 8y ago
> User friendly UIs are most often terrible for experts and expert UIs often have some learning curve. You don't have to choose one or the other, it just takes time to make it right for both. Word is a good example example. You want to type some text? It's easy. You want to format it? Click the icons that look relevant. You do it often? Keyboard shortcuts are available for everything. You want to do typesetting? Styles are available, but not enforced. You want to automate things? Integrated programming environment is waiting for you. And almost every action has its own page in the manual. Simple things are simple, tooltips and icons provide discoverability, and you can head to the manual for expert content. This is totally not how blender pre-2.8 works where the discoverability almost doesn't exist.
- Joeboy 8y ago
  Most of what you just said about Word (tooltips, keyboard shortcuts, icons, programming environment) is also true of Blender. But I don't really know what the equivalent of "just type some text" would be in Blender.
  - viraptor 8y ago
    Blender has the shortcuts and programming environment, but lacked the icons/tooltips in many cases. Many existing tooltips listed only what the button mapped to in the python environment.
    - Joeboy 8y ago
      Looking at Blender 2.79 right now, a comfortable 90% of icons, buttons etc have tooltips with useful (if terse) text. Some buttons are text instead of icons, but that's also true of Word. I don't doubt Word is more discoverable, partly because of Microsoft's resources and partly because word processing is fundamentally more accessible than 3D modelling. But by the metrics you're talking about, Blender is maybe 75-90% as good. Which I don't think is the same as "discoverability almost doesn't exist".
      - 8y ago

mikekchar 8y ago

I often find that people conflate ease of use with ease of learning. Both Vim and Blender are very easy to use. Blender is astonishingly easy to use, in fact. I've been using it for video editing and it's ridiculously more efficient than anything else I've ever used. Both Vim and Blender are very hard to learn and discovery is extremely poor. There is just no way to figure it out without reading the manual. Even after you read the manual, you have to practice it frequently to get good at it. After that it's a dream. I don't really like characterising a UI as "good" or "bad" in a one dimensional perspective, because whether I will choose an easy to use or an easy to learn application depends entirely on what I'm going to be doing. For example, with video editing (and also code editing), I'm doing the same actions over and over and over and over again. I'm also combining actions in different ways and I want a kind of "UI grammar" that lets me efficiently express myself without searching around for some drop down or macro. I use these tools for hours on end, day after day. I don't really care about ease of learning -- I only care about easy of use and efficiency. For other things, I really care about ease of use. For example, I make New Years cards once a year. I want some software that helps me make a mailing list, print an image without screwing about, etc, etc. I don't want to spend more than about 30 seconds setting it. It needs to be intuitive. If anyone knows of such a thing for Gnu/Linux, I'd be very happy ;-). Frequently ease of use and efficiency are at odds with ease of learning. Best if you can do both, but often you have to compromise. Both Vim and Blender compromise a lot, but they are aiming at a particular niche. Not everybody likes them, but those that do love them. Some other applications compromise in other ways, and at least for my applications I don't find them appropriate. YMMV.

gregmac 8y ago
I really like the contrast of ease of use vs ease of learning. However, I don't think designing an interface that is good for both is fundamentally difficult. The problem comes from evolution. In early versions, with only a few features, none of this requires a ton of thought. As features are added, it's rare that an overall UX re-design is undertaken, for a few reasons. For one, the people working on it and using it day to day are incrementally learning changes, and have time to adjust. In some cases they probably don't even notice the UX learning curve problem as it takes time to become apparent. For two, existing and power users will freak out if a new release changes shortcut keys or otherwise "moves the cheese". Think of the outrage if vim were to announce "we're changing all the commands to be fully consistent with each other, but it means every command you've spent years memorizing is now incorrect. Even for the most UX-focused team it's impossible to predict the feature set a product will have in 1, 2, or 5 years, so of course by the time you get there, the UX has issues.

InGodsName 8y ago

I'll give worst user interface to git.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
And I'll raise you CVS.
- webmaven 8y ago
  RCS.

ilaksh 8y ago

Vim has modes because key combinations didn't exist on that computer it was invented on and neither did cursor keys. It was a decent design for the original context.