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by Ian Bicking.
Original Post: UIs of the future: Ion, Emacs
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I was reading this
post where Sidnei talks a bit about productivity tools under
Linux. I also am a huge fan of Ion. It's far
simpler and more focused than the traditional window model, it lets me
program without undue distraction or the clerical work of window
manipulation.
The irony is that Ion is like a step back in time and could be seen as
a dramatic reduction in WM features. Or maybe it's a step sideways,
kind of like Emacs is. Emacs, compared by traditional measures, is
clearly inferior to other editors, it's crufty and awkward. But when
judged on its actual worth, not its similarity to traditional UIs, it
of course performs wonderfully. The same goes for Ion -- it does all
the really important parts of window management well, without any of
the stupid cruft, even if the stupid cruft has become ingrained in
modern UIs.
In my heart of hearts, I still believe this kind of simplicity has
potential for a larger audience. I feel confident that a large number
of computer users would find this greater simplicity a great aid to
productivity, and in fact deeply comforting. One of the most
challenging parts of computer use -- for all levels -- is keeping
track of everything that is going on. There's so many tasks -- the
manipulation of windows so you can see everything, getting the
keyboard focus right, the constant sidetrack as you move between one
side-task and another, all while you still have to concentrate on
whatever your real task is. Sure, you can get better at it,
but multitasking
has its costs, and I think those costs are higher than most of us
realize. And they aren't just productivity or accuracy -- there's an
emotional reaction, a level of stress that a poor UI can produce.
Of course, these particular implementations we choose as
programmers -- be it Ion or Emacs -- probably won't ever catch on.
But there's still a powerful idea there. The UIs we've been using
were designed for children 25 years ago, when everyone was a child
with respect to computers. The UIs so vaunted for their accessibility
to novices (WIMP, the traditional Mac interface, etc) are not
appropriate for the users of today, not to mention tomorrow. The
users of today are heavy computer users, if not always power users,
using their computer for hours each day both at work and home. The
investment of learning more powerful interfaces is worth it to them in
a way it wasn't to computer users of the 80's.
But I should be clear what I mean about more powerful interfaces -- I
don't mean things like Photoshop (or GIMP), but rather the simple yet
orthogonal interfaces, which in their careful selection of features
provide power without distraction. Features like tabs and type-ahead
searching in Mozilla (bookmarklets too?), or in a word processor the
view-tags feature of Wordperfect which exposes structure that lays
deeply hidden in MS Word. These are empowering features, sharply in
contrast to the disempowerment of a feature like Word's
autoformatting.
So there exists the potential for Linux to reach a larger audience,
and to really do something novel and important and maybe even
revolutionary, if we recognize what we've already accomplished instead
of judging ourselves by the kind of progress others have made. So
long as we believe our critics, we'll be stuck focusing on our flaws
instead of our unique abilities. That was my point in my recent
post, and I've unintentionally come back to it. Joel Spolsky
calls it Fire
and Motion -- you can't let your opposition get you pinned down,
you have to always advance. Gnome is pinned down, but software like
Ion and Emacs aren't because the opposition doesn't even realize they
exist. Still, they're honking great ideas -- let's do more of those!
(PS: try Ion for a couple days, you'll learn to love it, I swear)
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