I like articles that discuss out of ordinary approaches. This is one of those, and I relate to the pain the writer also has.
However...
> Different people use windows totally differently.
The older I get, the more impatient I am with this. In the industry, we normalized that high paid software developers (who are way better programmers, or infra people than I am) waste hundreds of engineering hours with their absolutely broken window management, and command-tab hell. Whenever I have to witness a screenshare of a colleague, my time is also wasted.
I wish this would be an interview gating: show us how you manage yourself in this big monorepo, switching tasks, windows, tabs, desktops, SSHs etc. Do not normalize noob time wasting.
Different people also use pianos differently. Yet, we don't appreciate a noob pushing random keys around it. It would be unpleasant to the ear, just how unpleasant (painful) it is to witness macOSs/gnomes bubblegum horror of sloppily animated chaos.
Back to my point: windows (as in viewports) are with us for many decades. I don't care if you tile, stack, infinite scroll them. Just be productive. Invest upfront in learning, be fast, and be able to explain what I you try to show me on screen.
There will be no one size fits for all, and that part I understand. But please have more dexterity with your desktop abilities than my grandma.
It's hard to argue with this, yet, I never learned to touch type or type fast, never bothered to learn a bunch of vim or emacs hot keys or rice a vim setup. I use pretty basic editors and ides that barely qualify as ides.
Everyone else around me blazes at the simple act of typing. And far fewer but some have powerful vim setups where they can do inarguably useful things fast.
You would be agonized to watch me type code.
But for 30+ years it never mattered. I spend 10x more time thinking than typing, or jumping around refactoring 300 things all over the place every 5 minutes, and propduce results that work, are efficient, and fail far more gracefully than everyone else.
(I'm not claiming to trade iteration for get-it-right-the-first-time, I obviously iterate and I'd even say the correctness of the final result is mostly the result of iteration).
Maybe it doesn't conflict with your point because even so I wouldn't exactly say I'm no more functional than your grandma, so maybe typing and vim/ide-ricing are just a couple of exceptions that I can afford to get wrong as long as everything else is good.
Though I don't know what else there even is to be "fast" at. I don't think I really even understand how one can be good or bad at mere window management. ssh-ing? What is there to that? knowing how to manage keys?
However, all in all, I like this. Even if it means I'd currently fall on the wrong side of this idea, I think I agree with this idea to have an expectation of basic competency with the tools in any field one would presume to get paid for. Maybe even now I should just suck it up and learn to type and develop a powerful vim setup.
Yes, the bar sometimes I have to witness, is low, very very low. I say that someone like you who even thinks and can rephrase thoughts about this, is already of the upper percentiles of capability.
OTOH presenting is a different skill. Maybe I should have elaborated that as a field expert of a (not-so-)niche thing, I often get contacted by random colleagues who will ask me to "let them quickly share their screen to show what the problem is". Their demonstrated horrific inability to "do computers" is surprising and upsetting.
Therefore I thought about this a lot in the past. Maybe the windows concept is wrong? Should there be more experiments like OP proposing? And slowly I start to believe, that probably the windows concept is okay, since you and me and thousands of others are capable, and it's just a skill issue.
I think the way both current windows and gnome(1) work out of the box are completely obtuse and when forced to use one I only become functional after undoing a dozen arbitrary, unnecessary, and actively self-inflicted wounds to make the environment minimally sane and utilitarian. So, there is a possible argument to say that bumbling was thrust upon them.
But really that just explains and excuses my mom, who does not work in any proximity to any flavor of IT.
(1) mac too just slightly less so, and I'm no fan just to be clear, I just think mac started out the worst in this way, then didn't get much worse over time while windows & gnome both got insanely worse
Every time I have to do something on someone's bog standard machine, I just think "how do you people live like this?"
Not that many years ago a flat unadorned description of win11 today would be taken as completely unbelievable hyperbole movie gag that could never get that crazy for real obviously. Funny because of recognizable elements of truth but too stupid to be realistic.
The frog has simply been boiled exactly slow enough I guess.
(I had a bunch of descriptions of actual absurd and perverse things to show examples but the comment was a wall of text!)
kmarc · · focus · HN ↗
However...
> Different people use windows totally differently.
The older I get, the more impatient I am with this. In the industry, we normalized that high paid software developers (who are way better programmers, or infra people than I am) waste hundreds of engineering hours with their absolutely broken window management, and command-tab hell. Whenever I have to witness a screenshare of a colleague, my time is also wasted.
I wish this would be an interview gating: show us how you manage yourself in this big monorepo, switching tasks, windows, tabs, desktops, SSHs etc. Do not normalize noob time wasting.
Different people also use pianos differently. Yet, we don't appreciate a noob pushing random keys around it. It would be unpleasant to the ear, just how unpleasant (painful) it is to witness macOSs/gnomes bubblegum horror of sloppily animated chaos.
Back to my point: windows (as in viewports) are with us for many decades. I don't care if you tile, stack, infinite scroll them. Just be productive. Invest upfront in learning, be fast, and be able to explain what I you try to show me on screen.
There will be no one size fits for all, and that part I understand. But please have more dexterity with your desktop abilities than my grandma.
Brian_K_White · · focus · HN ↗
Everyone else around me blazes at the simple act of typing. And far fewer but some have powerful vim setups where they can do inarguably useful things fast.
You would be agonized to watch me type code.
But for 30+ years it never mattered. I spend 10x more time thinking than typing, or jumping around refactoring 300 things all over the place every 5 minutes, and propduce results that work, are efficient, and fail far more gracefully than everyone else.
(I'm not claiming to trade iteration for get-it-right-the-first-time, I obviously iterate and I'd even say the correctness of the final result is mostly the result of iteration).
Maybe it doesn't conflict with your point because even so I wouldn't exactly say I'm no more functional than your grandma, so maybe typing and vim/ide-ricing are just a couple of exceptions that I can afford to get wrong as long as everything else is good.
Though I don't know what else there even is to be "fast" at. I don't think I really even understand how one can be good or bad at mere window management. ssh-ing? What is there to that? knowing how to manage keys?
However, all in all, I like this. Even if it means I'd currently fall on the wrong side of this idea, I think I agree with this idea to have an expectation of basic competency with the tools in any field one would presume to get paid for. Maybe even now I should just suck it up and learn to type and develop a powerful vim setup.
jagged-chisel · · focus · HN ↗
Things like “uh, where’s that file again?”, “the window disappeared”, etc shouldn’t happen during screen sharing, pairing, and demos.
In other words: be a good presenter.
Brian_K_White · · focus · HN ↗
kmarc · · focus · HN ↗
OTOH presenting is a different skill. Maybe I should have elaborated that as a field expert of a (not-so-)niche thing, I often get contacted by random colleagues who will ask me to "let them quickly share their screen to show what the problem is". Their demonstrated horrific inability to "do computers" is surprising and upsetting.
Therefore I thought about this a lot in the past. Maybe the windows concept is wrong? Should there be more experiments like OP proposing? And slowly I start to believe, that probably the windows concept is okay, since you and me and thousands of others are capable, and it's just a skill issue.
Brian_K_White · · focus · HN ↗
But really that just explains and excuses my mom, who does not work in any proximity to any flavor of IT.
(1) mac too just slightly less so, and I'm no fan just to be clear, I just think mac started out the worst in this way, then didn't get much worse over time while windows & gnome both got insanely worse
Every time I have to do something on someone's bog standard machine, I just think "how do you people live like this?"
Not that many years ago a flat unadorned description of win11 today would be taken as completely unbelievable hyperbole movie gag that could never get that crazy for real obviously. Funny because of recognizable elements of truth but too stupid to be realistic.
The frog has simply been boiled exactly slow enough I guess.
(I had a bunch of descriptions of actual absurd and perverse things to show examples but the comment was a wall of text!)