4 ms·
The original DF UI reminds me of vi, both good and bad.
by Natsu 4y ago
The original DF UI reminds me of vi, both good and bad.
- galangalalgol 4y agoAs a vim lover is it actually bad from a UX perspective? Having a learning curve can be offset by enhanced efficiency right?
- ericbarrett 4y agoIt's...pretty bad. (I have thousands of hours in both DF and vim.)
- LanceH 4y agoI'm personally not fond of having a command mode separate from a typing mode. As someone who learned to touch type (on a typewriter) I don't always look at the screen. In vi, if you're typing away while in command mode, all sorts of things can go wrong. The one sin I can't forgive, though, is that he movement keys aren't the same as the home row keys. jkl; would have been so much better. Everything else I'm willing to chalk up to preference -- I prefer the chording of emacs, but I can understand it's not for everyone. To me it feels like vi was written for hunt and peck typists.
- galangalalgol 4y agojkl; does make sense, I may try remapping that, though I don't really think about it anymore. I remap jj to esc so I don't have to leave the home row. I dont have to look at the screen unless I'm trying to build a regex for something. I do remember being in the wrong mode a couple times and doing odd things. My only problem with the chording is that my pinky gets tired way faster than my other fingers.
- LanceH 4y agoI would remap, but the major reason for using vi is that I'm hopping onto another machine or docker instance -- then my problem would become propagating my .vimrc file everywhere. So I keep my vi knowledge to plain vanilla on purpose, generally. I may be more suited to chording just because I have very large hands and will use either pinky, or the palm of my hand to hit the control on either side.
- Gigachad 4y agoPlenty of games do both. You can have buttons with hot keys visible on them. Age of empires is a good example. A total beginner can play just fine while a pro can play at extreme efficiency via hot keys. But most importantly, a beginner can transition in to hot keys gradually as they are very visually obvious.
- galangalalgol 4y agosuper good point, I learned all the shortcuts in excel by using the menus, back when it had menus. The shortcuts still work though the menus are gone. Not sure how someone would learn them now.
- Agentlien 4y agoI love Vim and DF but there is a big difference. Both do things very differently, both are complex and require time to learn. The difference is in consistency. Vim is mostly consistent and that's where its power comes from. Learning the underlying rules is an investment which allows you to intuit most of its functionality. DF is wildly inconsistent and a lot of its difficulty is in learning the quirks of its interface which offer only tedium and no advantages in themselves.
- Natsu 4y agoI mean, I like vi/vim, it just has a big learning curve that's none too helpful, but once you get going it's smooth. DF is like that too, every command is basically a single keystroke. Every menu option has some key assigned. So once you know what you're doing it's not too hard to do a lot of complicated things quickly, but you may have to study to understand what you should even be doing. It's kind of up to you to create the whole fortress from nothing and it's not always clear what you need to do to, say, make soap. You have to set up (and learn) entire production chains for items, get people to do the labor, etc.