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I think hackers (in any field) like "productive" user interfaces, everything else is irrelevant. There are productive WYSIWYGs and GUIs, look at e.g. Blender, b

I think hackers (in any field) like "productive" user interfaces, everything else is irrelevant. There are productive WYSIWYGs and GUIs, look at e.g. Blender, but they are usually hard to learn and/or they look really ugly, so they are not appreciated by commoners or designers. For the UI to be productive, it has to have a couple of features: - Highly configurable, possibility of presets - Accessible only by keyboard - Available for scripting You can combine those with smooth learning curve and nice design, but it's very hard thing to do. That's why application builders (on either side) usually don't bother.

anon4 12y ago
> very hard thing to do That's pretty much the entire reason. Plain text is easy and maps 1-to-1 with the keyboard you have right in front of you. And even when you start binding commands to keys, there isn't too much choice to be made. Making good complex GUIs is really hard and it seems to have the same kind of inherent complexity like programming - you can't simplify it past giving the developer a really shiny tool with which to put buttons in widgets really easily, which doesn't at all mitigate the hardship of designing exactly where the buttons go, what they say and how they act.