I think we already found out what works best for monitor+mouse+keyboard 20-ish years ago. There's a lot to improve in terms of consistency and various details, but I don’t think there's any new paradigm to be found that would work better.

Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster.

There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites:

- Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in!

- SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years.

- Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick.

- Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback.

- ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route.

- Magit (https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.

i think the first rule for me is: computers need to make things more simple for humans.

how we control our devices, how we use those controls to do things (like interact with these guis), currentlt the model makes things always difficult and practically ensures people lose immersion of their real life into some device screen and controlscheme.

tldr i guess; u can optimise guis etc. but if you dont change the interface to those guis its not reinventing anything. these things work in concert to generate the users experience.

I don't like tiling window managers, because I want most windows to be roughly centered in my field of view, and also vertically maximized. Actually, what I really want to be centered is the relevant contents of each window, which generally isn’t the same as centering the window itself, due to sidebars and other application-specific layout vagaries. Hence the necessity to save size and position per application. I also rarely need to see multiple windows simultaneously side-by-side. Having the windows centered and full size (if not full screen) trumps the drawback of having to press Alt+Tab or other keyboard shortcuts to switch between them.

[0] https://www.desksoft.com/WindowManager.htm

A couple of decades later, I went through so many macOS versions, Windows 7,8,10 and different Gnome/KDE/Xfce etc., to find out just recently (well, a couple of years by now) that sway wm (or i3wm for X11) is a thing. What a relief! I’m back into old calm days with no eternal switching and multitasking that takes so much of my attention, giving nothing in return. God, I wish I knew about that much much earlier! When I left Windows for good, that was the only thing I missed so much! Now I enjoy that and 300 MB of occupied ram out of my 16 or 32 GB setups. Would highly recommend to any nerd like me!

In floating systems, partially covered windows are useless and usually avoided: either you want to see everything, or you minimize the window. The few times one tries to actually keep a partially covered window (i.e. show only the last few lines of a terminal visible), the UX is terrible because as soon as you switch focus the visibility of the entire stack of windows changes, and you need to click around/Alt-Tab to restore the previous layout. For this reason, 99% of people just have a single window that's maximized per workspace.

Tiling window managers could be decent if they were a core experience, but in reality no one develops apps for them so you always have some popup that spawns and fills half your screen.

The major shortcoming of both is that they only work in rectangular, desktop-sized screens. Mobile UIs avoid both, and default to single-window-always-maximized, which still isn't good enough.

Scrollable tiling managers, however, would be the bee's knees: windows are laid out on an infinitely scrollable horizontal layout, which would also easily replicate the common side-by-side layout "power users" often rely on. There are some niche experiments like PaperWM, but they haven't ironed out the UX for some reason: if they just made the entire layout scrollable by panning on your touchpad/mobile screen, it would instantly be better than anything we have today, and free us from the tyranny of window management. Additionally, it would work with both our widescreen, cinema-sized desktop monitors, and mobile devices.

(I have never used it and memory might fail me, but I seem to remember Palm webOS devices had this scrollable "card" layout system which people seemed to like a lot. See https://www.palmtotal.com/sites/www.palmtotal.com/files/imag...)

The main drawback is that I absolutely never see my desktop background, but that’s about it.

It was mostly on the Workbench we used floating windows, and while we had "sort-of" spatial, in that the position of windows were remembered if you chose, the if you chose (by choosing "snapshot") part meant you were free to move folder around knowing they'd be back where they should be when you opened them again. To me it's always been annoying that the attempts at spatial on Linux all took it to the extreme of remembering every change, which to me was always the biggest wart of these systems.

I absolutely like expanding screen size, and can't deal with peoples tendency to opt for tiny little laptops, but at the same time, I don't need all that much physical screen space for most things because everything happens on separate "screens"/virtual desktops the way it used to back on my Amiga.

Refreshingly so at times. Comparatively it’s very distraction free.

Whenever I fire it up to journal or fiddle with some classic MacOS development I always think, “Where did we manage to go so wrong in the last 30 years?”

With all due respect, I can never take these self-made claims at face value. You definitely feel that you are more productive, but that may or may not be the actual case and it is easy to lie to ourselves.

From that list I use greetd + tuigreet as my login manager, sway-launcher-desktop for FZF-powered app launching, and wob for lightweight brightness and volume display (send '50' to the wob socket and it'll show 50%; it doesn't get simpler).

I'm curious if there are any particular guides/examples you would recommend, or whether your Nix config is open source somewhere?

Stumpwm is also very attractive. Less "Unixy" but more Lispy which is a different approach at getting exactly what you want.

https://omar.website/tabfs/

Text is a not an information-dense medium, and for many kind of data it simply sucks.

Also, please don’t just go around throwing productivity into sentences, it is just completely baseless and biased observation on your own part - if you better enjoy a new workflow, but it is actually slower, you might still feel more “productive”.

And, yes, I managed to bind slrnpull with GNU's avoiding a huge chunk of time. And, SLRN was much faster. On hackability, I don't care, awk/sed/sh it's my glue, and perl+CPAN for a big task.

In the end, it's being run on a batch basis with cron, so I have the ultimate Unix tools: let the tools do the hard work themselves with scripts, so you just ignore anything else and focus on your current task. Mails, news posts and RSS's are currently managed in the background, a single script will download and upload all the data.

The way I read it, they were attributing the intercombination of these elements under the desktop metaphor to Apple. Smalltalk existed, the Star existed, PERQ existed, the Lisp Machine GUIs existed and JERQ/Blit existed, but all of these were so substantially different from each other let alone what Apple did that they functionally exerted little influence on the way GUIs developed after the Macintosh launched save for a few odd branches here and there (Oberon anyone?)

Try some 3D creation tools, such as Autodesk Fusion or Blender. Those face a really hard problem. It took too many years to get 3D CAD and drawing up to a tolerable level. Selection in a cluttered 3D environment took a long time to solve. Most user-level GUIs are addressing a far simpler problem.

I'd just like to have borders back. They don't have to be big, or shadowed. Just present. I'm tired of overlapping borderless consoles in Ubuntu. Of web sites where there's a scrollable area with no border. Multiple scrollable areas with no border, as with Discord. Buttons with no indication of the live area. This stuff is borrowed from phones, but does not scale well to larger screens and more controls.