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Comment by sxp | Hacker News Reader

https://old.reddit.com/r/FUI/top/?sort=top&t=all is another favorite of mine. If you want an excessively deep analysis of sci-fi UIs, I suggest https://scifiinterfaces.com/

On a related note, does anyone have good recommendations for real-world "power UIs"? I.e, computer user interfaces that have a steep learning curve but are extremely powerful once mastered. E.g, vi/emacs or one line bash scripts + *nix CLI programs. AutoCAD/Blender and other 3D modeling tools also have good UIs once you go through the pain of mastering them and learn how to use them with one hand on a keyboard and one hand on a mouse.

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> AutoCAD/Blender and other 3D modeling tools also have good UIs once you go through the pain of mastering them

I'd like to add ZBrush and Houdini to this list. (Both of them are 3D modeling tools.)

ZBrush is known for having an extremely unintuitive UI, but once you figure it out it actually all makes perfect sense and generally you wouldn't want it any other way.

Houdini is weird because it's not very difficult for programmers to pick up, but it's very hard for everyone else. That's because it's literally a programming language for creating 3D models. As a Haskell fan I appreciate that the language is lazy, but aside from that it does leave something to be desired. That said, the HN crowd should be able to see why it's very powerful to create 3d models by programming them instead of by hand-manipulating a mesh (like you would in Blender or ZBrush).

Ableton (music creation software) is also extremely powerful but difficult to learn.

Lastly, it's not really a UI, but nix is a build system that's hard to learn but once you do learn it you can do things that would be very difficult in any other build system I know of.

I'm going to quip about Eve Online, lol. Tons of information screens, but also 3rd party tooling.

More serious software, it's probably investor software; you know the type, multiple screens of red / green flashing numbers, charts, and of course the Bloomberg terminal. These people play with millions under a button press.

Audio and video editing software. Example: Cubase with TAL-U-No-LX synth emulator in front of it, https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8M6-QOWEAQMgGl?format=jpg&name=...

I think VR/AR/MR have the most new realestate in terms of power-UI because you are physically present within the interface. The best examples to me are VR & Art based [1] which let you create 3D objects in a 3D space or Paint like you would in front of an easle. The UI's range from grabbing a spraycan suspended in mid air to menue controls for spline points and camera views. Still evolving and no where near feature parity with established tools but I see this changing over time.

[1] My Shortlist: OpenBrush, Gravity Sketch, ShapesXR, Vermillion, Vartiste, & Brushwork.

i3/sway style tiling window managers

Everything in that article can be done with css believe it or not.

Everything in that article can be done with Excel believe it or not.

I don't believe you.

Screenshot page, set background-image, done ;)

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