Re: [9fans] UI design | enhancements.

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

No offense taken, but just to note: I found Plan 9 very refreshing and very useful as it is.  It was a relief after the massive noise and clumsiness of traditional GUI, and the different but still irritating inherent clumsiness and bugginess of terminal emulation. That's not to say Plan 9 is without irritants, but it's the least irritating window system I've ever used.

You know, I'm *sure* that any goodness in today's GUIs is not the result of the paradigm but rather a good deal of care and sense, requiring considerable time and education, respectively.  The paradigm helps by standardising a few aspects of interaction, but you can't just apply it to programs and expect good results. It arguably has too few standards and too many features.  Far too many programs end up with nonsense like Celestia, where View Options is not under View but under the adjacent Render menu. I often want View Options to toggle certain markers, choosing between orienting the view and taking in the scene, but it's too out of the way; it doesn't have a shortcut because the author didn't imagine my use case.  The item browsers which I want even more often don't have keybindings either, which is astonishing! Other options are hidden under sub-menus; immensely fiddly things that they are.

The goodness in Plan 9's interfaces comes largely from a desire not to implement too much.  Instead, many of them are programmable.  Despite this, there are still major faults.  For instance, Acme's own window system is intrusive unless you follow a very specific workflow which was designed for programming only, and doesn't even seem to work for all programmers. Sam's dual clipboards are seriously intrusive for anyone who deals with a lot of snippets of text inside and outside the editor. (I've finally started using Sam now my usage is different, but for the entirety of my actual Plan 9 use it was just too painful.)


Besides, why would we want to attract people who are put off by superficial differences when the differences go all the way down? And, if I remember right, many Linux-lovers have bigger problems with those deeper issues than they do with the window system.  Those who can accept good-but-different internal design can and do accept different interface design.