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Hey, akkartik! The initial experience where I saw a lot of elements on the screen without knowing what's what was a lot. And sure enough - a lot of it had to d

Hey, akkartik! The initial experience where I saw a lot of elements on the screen without knowing what's what was a lot. And sure enough - a lot of it had to do with just learning how it works and what's what. But in addition to the UI that is unintuitive for the beginner, most of the keybindings either didn't make sense or were not convenient (talking about prefix). For example, splitting panes in my opinion are much better done with | and - symbols rather than " and %. I can see what they were going for with double quotes and the percent sign, but IMO vertical line and a hyphen make more sense. I do not need to be actively thinking about which one should I use for a vertical vs horizontal split. There was some aspect of "putting a lipstick on it" - for sure. Making it more pleasant to look at didn't improve function - just looks. I just think making your tools look the way you like and enjoy them will create a more pleasant experience and help you learn the tool faster too. The dreadfulness did come from not understanding it completely and being a noob early on. Fixing the style and function also put me into a process of being intentional about learning how the tool works and adjusting things that I didn't like. And you're right - it is not more gatekeepy that other tools per se. I was simply describing my experience and what I ended doing about that.

akkartik 1y ago
Thanks! I'm glad I asked, because there does seem something here I can learn from. I care very much about what makes a power tool with a high ceiling gatekeepy. What were the "lot of elements" in the screenshot? Ignoring shell stuff, is it the bar at the bottom? Is it the "[0]" and the "0:bash*"? The "Macbook-pro" might seem familiar to someone familiar to the shell, who is used to seeing it in the prompt of an uncustomized shell. The date and time likewise seem obvious what they mean. Am I missing anything? I think the keybindings being non-mnemonic there's only so much you can do about. Vim's hjkl were mnemonic on the VT-100 terminal, but keybindings outlast mortal hardware. So the ability to rebind is in some ways the best you can get IMO. Zooming out, the best power UI I've been able to come up with is a combination of a Wordstar-like always-on menu showing common keybindings, and a command palette. Here are a couple of UIs I've made, I'm curious what you think of them: https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/108766067153506592 https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/108766067153506592 https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/html/20210624-shell.png https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/html/20210624-shell...
- zem 1y ago
  don't know if you used lotus 123 back in the day, but it was one of the best keyboard-driven interfaces i've seen. everything was done by navigating hierarchical menus, but the menus were displayed horizontally in a bar on the bottom of the screen, no popups to obscure the rest of the display. so if you were a power user you would just automatically type e.g. /fs to open the file menu and then the save option thereunder, but if you were new to it you could look down, see that /f was file and when you hit that the bar would change to include s:save and you could hit that.
  - akkartik 1y ago
    That's awesome. I never used Lotus, but it sounds like it might have had the same idea before Wordstar which influenced me.
    - zem 1y ago
      yeah, it went one step beyond wordstar because the menus did not drop down and cover up your screen, the menu was all horizontal, so if you knew the keystrokes via muscle memory you never saw menus flashing on the screen. i think nano does something similar these days.
      - akkartik 1y ago
        Ohh, I see. It wasn't just a static menu bar at the bottom, but some hotkeys were modes and the menu bar would update when you pressed them. Pico/Pine still has something like that where ^o used to stand for "other commands" and the menu would show new hotkeys when you pressed it. I don't remember if Wordstar had some escape hatch like that. It certainly had a lot of commands.
    - thesuperbigfrog 1y ago
      >> I never used Lotus If anyone is curious, there is a Linux port of Lotus123: https://github.com/taviso/123elf https://github.com/taviso/123elf

akkartik 1y ago

Thanks! I'm glad I asked, because there does seem something here I can learn from. I care very much about what makes a power tool with a high ceiling gatekeepy. What were the "lot of elements" in the screenshot? Ignoring shell stuff, is it the bar at the bottom? Is it the "[0]" and the "0:bash*"? The "Macbook-pro" might seem familiar to someone familiar to the shell, who is used to seeing it in the prompt of an uncustomized shell. The date and time likewise seem obvious what they mean. Am I missing anything? I think the keybindings being non-mnemonic there's only so much you can do about. Vim's hjkl were mnemonic on the VT-100 terminal, but keybindings outlast mortal hardware. So the ability to rebind is in some ways the best you can get IMO. Zooming out, the best power UI I've been able to come up with is a combination of a Wordstar-like always-on menu showing common keybindings, and a command palette. Here are a couple of UIs I've made, I'm curious what you think of them: https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/108766067153506592 https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/108766067153506592 https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/html/20210624-shell.png https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/html/20210624-shell...

zem 1y ago
don't know if you used lotus 123 back in the day, but it was one of the best keyboard-driven interfaces i've seen. everything was done by navigating hierarchical menus, but the menus were displayed horizontally in a bar on the bottom of the screen, no popups to obscure the rest of the display. so if you were a power user you would just automatically type e.g. /fs to open the file menu and then the save option thereunder, but if you were new to it you could look down, see that /f was file and when you hit that the bar would change to include s:save and you could hit that.
- akkartik 1y ago
  That's awesome. I never used Lotus, but it sounds like it might have had the same idea before Wordstar which influenced me.
  - zem 1y ago
    yeah, it went one step beyond wordstar because the menus did not drop down and cover up your screen, the menu was all horizontal, so if you knew the keystrokes via muscle memory you never saw menus flashing on the screen. i think nano does something similar these days.
    - akkartik 1y ago
      Ohh, I see. It wasn't just a static menu bar at the bottom, but some hotkeys were modes and the menu bar would update when you pressed them. Pico/Pine still has something like that where ^o used to stand for "other commands" and the menu would show new hotkeys when you pressed it. I don't remember if Wordstar had some escape hatch like that. It certainly had a lot of commands.
  - thesuperbigfrog 1y ago
    >> I never used Lotus If anyone is curious, there is a Linux port of Lotus123: https://github.com/taviso/123elf https://github.com/taviso/123elf