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Does anyone here have any ideas about how computer interfaces should work? Or, in other words what sort of features would you want in an 'ideal' (for you) computer system?
I've been thinking about this for awhile, and I have some wishes:
A lot of the above already exists, but only in pieces instead of in a fully unified system. Or else in a unified system that does some of these things, but not all of them.
honestly basically the only thing i'm missing is the ability to control things with gestures, i just want to point at the computer and turn my hand to raise and lower volume when i'm on the other side of the room..
I don't understand like half of what's written here, but I'd be happy to drop how I confronted such problems.
(On Window Manager) I use
dwm
( doom :{ ), I likedwm
,dwm
has a lot of quirks. But it's so extensible by your own shell scripts, to the point where you'd have something radically different than what you started with. Your own window manager tailored for your very own specific needs. You know that meme of that one person that has way too many keybindings so they'd have to place a peddle under their feet to shuffle through key bindings? I want that, where do I get one, and how do I set it up?(Better Markup) Yeah I've been having issues with this lately. This will tie in with another point you made about a series of linked wiki articles. I have been using
hugo
, and there is this little neat feature called "shortcodes" that lets you make say a shortcode for a an image that rotates, then you go to the Markdown file and just type "{{ < shortcode_name >}} providing the necessary arguments. Andhugo
will compile for you an image that you rotate along side the Markdown content. Yes you need to know HTML and CSS for it, but I think it gives you quite the augmented Markup(Responsive Terminal UI?). Hmm. Hmmmm. I would say sixel, but since you want collapsible sections. May I suggest building your own local wiki again? Maybe embedding a web browser inside of the terminal to get intractability.
Unifed UI. To be honest when you first mentioned this, my brain jumped to
lf
file manager. Inside it, it opens programs based on the type of the files and the programs that I specified:neovim
to view/edit text files.zathrua
for documents.nsxiv
for images. Especially with key-hander and you become a god. Here are some of my shortcuts fornsxiv
:nvim
also as document editor since most of what I write is just Markdown converted to PDFs.st
There is this neat patch fordwm
(Patch meaning you'd have to download this feature and patch it into vanilladwm
) that is called "swallow". In which a terminal would swallow graphical programs ran from inside it. In the previous list,zathura
andnsxiv
are graphical programs, but they'd get swallowed, giving the illusion of a unified UI system.(Auto Complete With Descriptions) I don't understand the first half. But for completion: In

zsh
usually detailed auto complete is handled by the program you installed. My script calledsc
meaning "stupid commands" has options with descriptions. Searching this with a hotkey can be easily done with zsh plus some kinda of A W K black magic. Or your favorite text stream manipulator.(Better Bash) I haven't done any form of pure bash scripting, so I have much to learn.
(The Ultimate Manual) Yes. Yes. Yes. The closest thing I have to that is a downloaded version of the Arch Wiki that I can use in my browser offline. Although I'd love to see a dynamically generated system manual, that would get you what you want immediately instead of having to read the full arch wiki article. I would love to think about how such a thing could be developed. For now Man pages and the Arch wiki are enough for me. But yes, a dynamic manual, absolutely!
(Configs Linking To Manual) Have you heard of explainshell.com? Yes it's for commands, and it tells you what the arguments do. I wonder if a similar thing could be developed for config files. It would gather all of your config options, and then using black magic it would predict how the program is gonna behave based on the given config options. I might have used the word "black magic" instead of an LLM. I don't know if I can trust those things...
(Indexed Full Text Search) ... Like I said, my documents are Markdown so it can be easily searched with grep. Although I wonder if a database of text generated by an OCR could give such a functionality. For now I open my document, and search it using
zathura
.(Tags) Tags. MMMM. I don't know what a BeOs is but I know that I use
hydrus
to manage any kind of files using tags. I can find any meme I have saved, because I tag them with multiple tags. Some people have usedhydrus
to manage audio, text files, and all other shenanigans. But to be honest,hydrus
seems very hacky to me, it is not extensible, after all it's like a personal booru. I'm waiting for a command line client that accesses thehydrus
database (kinda like how you can controlMPD
usingmpc
.MPD
being the Music Playing Daemon, andmpc
its client.)(File System Snapshots With Version Control) Yeah. This is pretty nice. Wait, is
git
not able to handle the whole system so we need a specific file system made for that purpose? Holy shit. Now that I think about it, you will be able to see everything that ever happened on Computer. Would take a shit fuck ton of space though. But I hear that storage is cheap, so go nuts.(Plan 9) I always wanted to get into what the whole Plan 9 is about. Sadly I don't know anything about this.
Please don't laugh. I don't know what a "namespace" is.
In the end, it appears that most of these are hacky ways of getting what you want. You said it yourself, the perfect/ideal system. But that's what it is, perfect. In my view, you can get very close to perfect but never fully realizing it. But that's the beauty of it, how many nights did I spend trying to make all kinds of wacky shell scripts. Just take a look at what my scripts are named:
animateRotate
avgstudytime
Emojis.sh
genart
gendunstrc
Genre
popup-dict
RemoveNumbas
shoot
and my personal favoritesort_by_how_many_files_were_created_on_a_date
a script that I took 2 or 3 hours to write, then used only once. Ahhh, Computer.This was written using
nvim
withVimWiki
as a Markdown file using Markdown syntax highlighting, that I forgot how I set up.PS: I feel bad for not providing git repos because of my own laziness and incompetence.
That was a good comment, thanks.
I'll try to clarify a little bit more about what I was talking about and reply to some stuff.
example.mp4 ffmpeg
, instead offfmpeg example.mp4
. In the second case you need to know thatffmpeg
exists to begin trying to manipulate the video file, in the first case you could hypothetically typeexample.mp4 [tab]
then get a list of programs that are registered as being able to handle mp4 files, allowing you to discover ffmpeg's existence. This discoverability is one of the big reasons that graphical interfaces are perceived as more user friendly than a terminal. That's what I mean when I say using anoun verb
syntax would be more similar to right click (specifically right click --> open with). Of course you'd still want the ability to force a specific program to try to ingest a type of file its not associated with, but you can do that with [right click] --> [open with] too.cat /dev/screen | topng > screenshot.png
. Even other devices on the network are represented as (virtual) files in a folder, and everything is accomplished using file operations.Welp do I feel stupid, I got carried away explaining my setup. I will check some surface information about Plan 9, and watch the Mother Of All demos later, but from the way you described it it seems really interesting.
Window Manager: I've seen Niri, and like you said everyone has their own preference for a window manager. But for me it seemed like Niri's infinite scroll feature is just workspaces, but it's neat I'm not gonna lie. I'll try it once I go wayland. Also thanks for the Macropad thing :)
Better Markup, Responsive Terminal UI, Unified UI: Aha I can see what you mean.
I wonder if you can take this a step further and implement it on the window manager level. Program windows can also be viewed as a list which you can collapse and stuff. On a sidenote, there's this window manager that lets you collapse windows (I think) I couldn't find the original unixporn post though "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upCemv2UaLc&t=117"
zsh
allows you to write your own completion system. You can then enter "example.mp4" hit[tab]
and it will show you programs that handle such files. Since this feature is so useful, I think I'm gonna find out how graphical file managers manage such a think and implement it into a script usinglf
. I already havelf
open things based on their mimetypes and I can just as easily add more programs to open such files. Do you know how many programs I found out from using the "Open With" feature?[Option]=[Value] [Description]
. Man pages already have a standard way of being written from what I have seen. If we can agree on a standard config format, then we can make all kinds of wacky shit with it.Now to whether or not this should be a standard on the OS level... I really don't know. I mean I absolutely want it, but I'm pretty sure people would come up with a million ways of why this should stay as it is: The user has to install it themselves.
hydrus
is really fucking nice, it is sorta like a file manager. But I think it needs a lot of rework. Alsohydrus
in a way is a unified UI that lets you view videos, text files, images, and maybe other file formats, to be honest I never checked. Although for opening and editing it mostly relies on external programs.PS: On Tagging. Just look at immich and it's ability to let you search photos and videos using tags generated by AI. Like searching "A black cat sitting on a couch". You can search stuff on their demo "https://demo.immich.app/" I understand that you meant this as a filesystem thing. But I'm just dropping the link for someone in the future to look at how cool this is.
cat /dev/screen
sounds wonderful.Well this has been wonderful. I may reply more in the near future once I get the time to check things like Niri, The Mother Of All Demos, and Plan 9's philosophy.
I'm not a power user but I'm petty happy with my basic arch/KDE Plasma 6/wayland setup. It does its best to do absolutely nothing more than i ask it to which really just means it stays the fuck out of my way and doesn't bother me. It's perfect.