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> I'm a UX designer/developer. There is something to be said for these old terminal systems, when it comes to repetitive daily tasks. Out of curiosity, are you

by Athas 8y ago

> I'm a UX designer/developer. There is something to be said for these old terminal systems, when it comes to repetitive daily tasks. Out of curiosity, are you then employing the experiences of your mother when designing user interfaces? I'm a programmer, and I rarely design anything more complex than a static website or a CLI. I have no illusions about UI design being easy. However, I am disappointed that it seems most UI designers, whom I do assume to be competent, are working on UIs that are optimised for ease-of-use by the novice, rather than the expert. I use and enjoy several programs that have "expert-optimised" UIs. Emacs is one, and the Unix shell is another. However, these are grown in an ad-hoc way, usually by people who did not think too hard about UI. I wonder what an optimised expert-oriented UI would look like, if it were developed by true UI experts.

pjc50 8y ago
Terminal-style input queueing is made impossible by the OS most of the time. You can't queue input commands for a window that hasn't appeared yet, because they get sent to some other window that currently does have the focus. Per example upthread: > imagine hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del, entering your login and password, hitting Enter, entering FFOX to run Firefox, hitting Enter, hitting F3 to open a tab, entering news.ycombinator.com, hitting Enter, hitting F3 for another tab, entering another URL, hitting Enter and it just works. Your machine can be waiting to show you the login screen, or applying some global policies, or launching Firefox, but it will never lose your input. You'd have to wait after starting firefox for it to appear to get your input queued correctly. Within a browser you can mostly hit Ctrl-T and start typing, although I've seen this break down. Edge for some reason was bad at this. Within websites there is often anti-user javascript which causes problems: the absolute worst offender is Facebook, after you've put focus in a text box you need to wait for it to settle or your text will come out in the wrong order.

by Athas 8y ago

pjc50 8y ago

Terminal-style input queueing is made impossible by the OS most of the time. You can't queue input commands for a window that hasn't appeared yet, because they get sent to some other window that currently does have the focus. Per example upthread: > imagine hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del, entering your login and password, hitting Enter, entering FFOX to run Firefox, hitting Enter, hitting F3 to open a tab, entering news.ycombinator.com, hitting Enter, hitting F3 for another tab, entering another URL, hitting Enter and it just works. Your machine can be waiting to show you the login screen, or applying some global policies, or launching Firefox, but it will never lose your input. You'd have to wait after starting firefox for it to appear to get your input queued correctly. Within a browser you can mostly hit Ctrl-T and start typing, although I've seen this break down. Edge for some reason was bad at this. Within websites there is often anti-user javascript which causes problems: the absolute worst offender is Facebook, after you've put focus in a text box you need to wait for it to settle or your text will come out in the wrong order.