Minimalism (computing)

It is a very cool feature, but can you think of a sensible use for it on a machine that can run the entire screen in high resolution and full colour?

I believe that statement (the first half, anyway) is simply not true. X11 is capable of displaying different windows at different color depths. Look at the "int depth" parameter to XCreateWindow, or run xwininfo(1) and check out the "Depth:" line.

Today I suspect it's not used much, if at all. When you've got a 256MB video card, what's a few extra bytes? Modern graphics cards might not even support this.

But I believe that 15 or 20 years ago, this feature actually did get used. You'd have a depth=24 root window, and a depth=4 (say) hardware overlay for things like the mouse cursor and popup menus, because they didn't really need a lot of colors, and you don't want to redraw your expensive graphics every time you moved the mouse.

Of course, everybody thought that dealing with hardware overlays and custom colormaps everywhere was a royal pain for application developers (and it was), so we came up with higher-level toolkits like GTK+ which make it really easy to splat up a window without caring about this, and it'll just use depth=24 (or whatever you've got) everywhere, and we've got tons of video memory so nobody cares anyway.

I'm not saying X11 was particularly good at this, but it did support this particular feature.

How is vi considered minimalist compared to Notepad?

I am not sure how Nedit qualifies either.

True even without the "(math)". I've always liked the idea of elegance applied to writing -- the best writing, like the best code, uses simple language to unusually strong effect.

perhaps they mean in terms of UI design, not software design?

I saw in one of Ian Piumarta's talks that OSX has considerably more lines of code than vista. Kinda surprises me, kinda doesn't.

All that selling. All that marketing. Disgusting.