gemini://midnight.pub/posts/336

Boy, the modern web does not have much love for those of us who don't care to use a mouse.

I've gotten used to keyboard-centric terminal applications, and now find GUIs to be tremendously frustrating for mouse-less use. I have to tab HOW many times to get to the thing I want? And unless it's scripted correctly, I may not even know I'm there? Great. And then I hit enter and get "this page requires javascript, please fuck off you luddite hillbilly."

This wretched digital design chaos is what draws me to projects like Gemini. I only wish CLI apps weren't so programmer-centric and fussy. I just want to do basic consumer computing things, just...with a keyboard, and without all the cruft and madness of the modern web. Banking would be nice, but it seems impossible. I've thought about going back to mailing checks to people, honestly. I probably won't. I'd love to be able to be a part of texting conversations with my friends who are all on iMessage, but that also seems impossible.

I'm just griping. I have no solutions. I don't want to fall into a digital 'default state' because the alternative has been made so difficult to access. My primary computer is a Raspberry Pi4 with a Vortex Core keyboard, so I'm already pretty far down that rabbit hole :)

Apologies, Pub-goers. I'm in the cups tonight and if you don't care to toast my minor sorrows, that's fair. I still love you all. Stumble home safe, all you madmen and women. (psst! What's the gender neutral for folks who are mad? I can't think of it!)

I experimented with desktops such as Rat Poison but as you say, the web is where the problem is. And since so it's inescapable, it's a problem.

I've given up. I use DVORAK keyboard layout so even solutions that give VIM/Emacs key bindings are clunky without QWERTY.

I'll sure drink to your (our) sorrow. And we are not even talking yet about things you can only do from a cellphone!

Tridactyl is probably my favorite Firefox extension. I felt very powerful when I was first learning to use it. Now it is second nature to me and I loathe using any browser that isn't set up the way I like it.

I'll definitely toast those sorrows! I'll rant not just about the web but about the whole damn thing :)

At one point there was a semi 'standard' of sorts for text/character mode software, much like you can depend on Ctrl-C,V, X, Z to all do the same things. I'm thinking back to old DOS software, Lotus-123, Borland C/Pascal, etc etc.

Back when NT was being designed, either Gates or maybe it was MS Marketing insisted that it have the Windows userland interface. And so that began the era of admins that didn't really understand systems, and of shitty UIs, stealing development time away from a still imperfect but eventually solid OS kernel. I would have loved to have seen an alternate future where NT had a basic, simple to navigate windowing system was designed to do nothing more than host text/character software that had access to an expanded 32-bit API (they had POSIX compatibility as well), and for all the admin tools to have been designed for the console first.

Of course this is squarely where Linux/BSD landed for a while, but even now desktop Linux is so graphically oriented and the beast that is Electron apps raises inefficiency in code to an art form. Yes, this can be undone and you can have that ideal (to me) balance, but geez it's a lot of work, and then the software you'd want to run to do the same thing takes some tracking down if it exists at all, and so many services (as you said, like banking) are reached via browser/GUI or not at all.

I don't have a solution either except that I've had to make peace with the GUI, it's not going away for any but the most dedicated-purpose desktop systems. So I try to tune things such that it can be an unobtrusive shell to organize what I'm trying to do. And of course, some things would barely be possible without it. I can't imagine editing audio in a CLI version of Audacity, or images in... whatever the thing is for that (GiMP still?). But it would be nice if the general mindset of the whole industry was "text when you can, GUI when you must".

The Web, Mouse-Less

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