< The Web, Mouse-Less

~abacushex

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".

Another round bartender! Nerd griping makes me thirsty!

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