💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 1774 captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:49:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-10)
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I recently got myself a new computer. I haven't had one like this for a long while now. All I've really used for the past many years has been a little old netbook I got on a pawn shop over 6 years ago. For reasons I have used for the most part the command line in all this time. Yes I've used X and web browsers on it, and Emacs, and say, ghostscript and the like. But I've done most of what I do on the command line, and it's very unfamiliar to me suddenly using "modern" GUI applications. I installed Godot and Gimp, and I have been reading the docs and tutorials, but I feel quite out of my element. I am sure all these tabs and menus and buttons have very useful information throughout, but I get easily overwhelmed with all this new information in my eyes. I guess it alwasys takes time to get to know a new technology.
Back when I was a teen I used Game Maker to make games. It was pretty simple and straightforward, back then OOP and finite-state actors were the kinds of things you needed learn, now the intro to Godot points me to the Model View Controller architecture! Good thing I've kept up on computer science, if only just a little bit!
Anyway I just wanted to say that fancy GUIs that I expect would be easy to use for anyone from my generation are a mystery for me, as if I had stopped using computers in the 90s but still had to deal with systemd!
~bartender, I'd like some earl gray, please.
I agree with ~ew on the value of tiling window managers. I've used them everyday for probably 16 years or more now. I started with StumpWM (Common Lisp) and later moved to XMonad (Haskell). However, since I'm such a heavy Emacs user, it was always pretty frustrating for me to have to constantly context switch between XMonad keybindings for controlling the desktop windows and Emacs keybindings for controlling Emacs windows. Then I discovered the holy grail of tiling window managers (for me anyway): EXWM, the Emacs X Window Manager. I've been using this as my daily driver for almost a decade now, and I absolutely love it. My desktop basically boots into multi-monitor, full screen Emacs. There's just one set of keybindings (because Emacs is already a tiling window manager by itself), and the EXWM package allows me to open arbitrary X applications (like Firefox or QGIS) in Emacs windows. Problem solved.
Howdy ~detritus, computers are first and foremost this: a time sink!
~bartender? That refill jar is empty again :-)
fancy GUIs
are a complete mystery to me. I have ranted about this elsewhere. I'm not alone, here's one about scroll bars
gemini://freeshell.de/gemlog/2024-03-19_How_hard_is_a_scroll_bar_.gmi
IFFF you miss the shell, well, possibly you can do away with the fancy GUI by using a tiling window manager, for example i3 or its wayland sibling sway. I did start with xmonad fully expecting it to make me angry within half an hour or so. But no, a week later I realized, I'm still using this thing :) I changed to i3 due to my lack of Haskell foo. I never looked back to fvwm2 or Xfce. I can still start mouse driven things like KiCAD or gimp and give them a full screen. So if you feel adventurous, you might want to try this. Have fun!