Always offering gum and tic taks to everyone.

BeOS is my favorite desktop OS of all time. Nowadays I run Linux on all my machines, but there are things that it was better and faster at on a Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM than today’s multi GHz and multi GB systems running Linux, MacOS or Windows. I’m not sure how much of that you will see in a demo like this, as is was more day to day things from back when we cared about local files and applications and weren’t permanently connected to the internet. But still, it was amazing.

I daily drive Debian on a couple of thirteen year old laptops. This is exactly right and I’m damn happy about it.

I feel this deep in my soul. My kids don’t have tablets or phones and are only allowed to watch things with us there that we approve of. And yet, somehow, my youngest wants to talk about fucking Mikey and JJ videos.

A decent number of modern TUIs do that, lazygit for example. I also find that tldr and navi do a great job of explaining those inscrutable options.

So true. I mostly live in the embedded world but have had to write GUIs from time to time, mostly to connect and send commands to some sort of embedded device.

I always start with a cli version for testing and then write the GUI. A quick wrapper around the comms library and I’m done.

But there are so many annoying fiddly little details in the GUI to deal with that it usually takes as long just to write the GUI as it does the entire rest of the code. Layout, menus, tooltips, icon choices, dealing with screen sizes, DPI, resizing windows, responsive data, etc.

Edit: A simple example that I’ve dealt with many times is reading and writing config data. For the CLI version it’s typically two commands:

‘tool read_cfg’ reads from the device and prints the config to stout

‘tool write_cfg’ reads a config from stdin and sends to the device.

Add a ‘-f’ option to use a file instead of stout for people that don’t remember how to use redirects. Add a couple of documentation sentences to the help command. If there are any issues, print them to stderr and bail. If the user wants to edit the config they can use whatever $EDITOR they prefer.

The same functionality in a GUI means that you have to first implement an editor for values. In my case that was generally a bunch of nested key/value pairs so I could probably find a widget that would work. And then understand how it handles being resized, gets styled, uses tooltips, etc. Of course there would need to be some code to get the data into and out of that widget which would probably need massaging. Then I need to let the user know if there are local edits. And then there is the fact that the data is now in three places, on a local disc, on the device, and in the editor and I need to communicate with the user that there is a difference between loading and saving from disc vs the device. Do I give a warning that loading from once place will overwrite anything they’ve changed in the editor? How do I make the four load/save buttons have obvious icons? And how to handle errors? An annoying pop up? Partially load the data? Something else? So many little things that have to be designed, implemented, and tested.

Oh I agree, I’m not saying that PDF is some sort of document format perfection. But it is a fully open one with a spec that fits in 250 pages, as opposed to docx’s 7500(!!) page spec with undocumented binary blobs mixed in.

I see you too are a person of culture.

Are fine, but not 100% compatible with all Office files and very heavyweight for viewing a document.

The problem is that Office file formats are an “open” standard but not a real open standard. PDF is.

Edit: Hell, not even all Office files are openable in all modern versions of Office. I have an Excel file I have to use once a quarter that will only open in locally installed versions of Office, not Office365. I keep a VM with Windows on it just for this one file.

What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?

This is called Dutch Disease and most often happens with natural resources, but also with natural stupidity.

The state of office desks has been continuously getting worse my entire career.

The very first place I interviewed had small private offices with a door for everyone. They weren’t any bigger than a decent sized cubicle but were real separate rooms and most of them had exterior windows. I didn’t get that job though.

My first desk at my first engineering job was in a cubicle with real six foot tall walls, a window with a nice view, big L desk, shelves, filing cabinets, etc.

Then I got the same setup, but in a fabric cube. Honestly, not really a downgrade. I had that setup three times, and the only difference was how good the view was.

Then the same but no windows.

Then a smaller cube with a simple 6 foot desk and a single cabinet.

Then a line of 6 foot wide desks with privacy screens on three sides.

Then privacy screen on left and right only.

Then no screens.

Then four foot desks.

My current office is four foot desks that are hotdesked for most people. But we are also completely remote if you want, so I use my nice desk that I built at home 90% of the time.

I joined a Canada based company in the last year. Every time we chat abooot non-work stuff I find yet another reason to be envious of them.

In my case, I use several different types of machines: Personal Linux desktop, personal low end Linux laptop, remote servers where I have sudo, work Mac, shared remote work servers where I don’t have sudo. I want my setup to be basically the same everywhere so that my muscle memory works, but there are some things that also need to be a bit different for each. Hence, a dot files manager that lets me run one command to keep my environment consistent in all those different targets. I use chezmoi + git for it nowadays.

This is it exactly. When I was using Npp, Windows didn’t have anything resembling a package manager. Does it even really have one now?

Fuck. I haven’t used Npp in a long time, but that’s awful. Glad they were able to get it fixed and their transparency is to be highly commended. But damn does it make me worry about other projects. Npp isn’t exactly obscure, but it’s also not exactly a massive target either.

Hmm, nope. A bunch of bank branches got remodeled after a merger and a local gas station is being torn down and replaced, but nothing new.

Yeah, the libraries are pretty great. I’m working on a kinda personal kinda professional project right now. Ideally it would support reading and writing about seven different sorta obscure file formats. For a bunch of reasons I’m writing it in rust and there is a good library for one of them, multiple half assed libraries for another, and none for any of the others. There is excellent support for all of them as a single Python library. My first step has become writing a comprehensive rust library for all of them.

Nope, not an IDE thing. I’ve never used a Python ide, and have the same issues as well.

It looks like that is Windows only?!? So there is yet another incompatible tool?