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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

We predict that people who have grown up with computers will be much more capable as computer users than the current generation of users. Thus, they will be able to use (and will in fact, demand) expressive interfaces with advanced means of expressing their wants.

How unfortunate that this did not turn out to be the case, and I think it's likely that is because most people liked the "simple and easy" Mac-like UIs with no learning curve, and didn't want to grow beyond them.

The point about "user control" is odd though, since that's basically the exact opposite of the Apple philosophy today, and even the older Macs seemed more opaque and with less user control than the PCs of the time.

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It may be more a case of "unknown unknown".

In essence people don't know what they don't know, thus they can't really evaluate what they have vs what they could have.

It is one of those things that drive me up the wall when i hear someone quote Ford about faster horses.

Its not that people would actually want a faster horse. But when what they know is horses, they will use those to describe their wants.

Similarly i recall a claim from the KDE community that to properly rethink how they did program launching they had to abolish the use of terms like "menu" as it would effectively lock their thinking into familiar terms.

Or perhaps "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail".

Aren't tiling window managers, and the revival of vim-like keybindings (vimperator, zathura...) somehow a bit of response to this demand?

I'm very satisfied with keyboard-driven, text-mode little Unix applications that compose well. For example, as old as mutt is, you can still plug it in to e.g. notmuch to achieve very modern Gmail-like indexing.

> tiling window managers

A tiny fraction of the already small number of linux users

> revival of vim-like keybindings

Probably less small, but still miniscule. I do think it's safe to say the idea that "digital natives" would demand more powerful interfaces didn't come true.

Windows 8.1 has a tiling window interface. 8.0 tiled to a lesser degree.

I know windows 7 had the "snap" feature that let you tile two windows side-by-side by dragging one window to the left and the other to the right. Does Windows 8.1 do tiling any better/automatically?

I think this is referring to the Windows 8 apps?

I wonder how much Windows 10 will add to that, as there you can drag windows into one of the corners to have it adopt a defined screen space.

Hm. Having to drag windows at all seems to be a serious deficiency in a "tiled" implementation.

Seems that at least on Windows 7 you could do Windows key plus arrow keys to do certain actions, left/right being dock to that edge, up maximize, down minimize.

Not sure how they will be extending that in Windows 10.

"A tiny fraction of the already small number of linux users"

OSX has several tiling applications that work quite well - I have been using OSX as a tiling WM since 2009 and it works great. Prior to that I used ion3 in FreeBSD.

It is a minority, but it's not at all limited to Linux users. Further, didn't I read that the new Windows had tiling built in in some capacity ?

With OS X "splitscreen", tiling window management becomes very accessible.

I use Spectacle, a window management utility. It is pretty limited since all it can do is resizing and moving windows, not take over their chrome completely, like fullscreen/splitscreen mode.

It also hasn't been the case (yet, maybe?) to me mostly because we haven't been teaching computer science fundamentals in most schools, sadly...

And I mean learning fundamentals, not training for proprietary solutions like Office that isn't what high school is about.

Not me. I want a more visual, more direct-manipulation, more graphical IDE. Goose, gander, sauce.

> The point about "user control" is odd though, since that's basically the exact opposite of the Apple philosophy today, and even the older Macs seemed more opaque and with less user control than the PCs of the time.

As an advanced user, I don't want more control. I want defaults that are good enough that I never want to change them.

Every hour I spend tinkering with my computer, is an hour I didn't spend achieving useful work. Sometimes yak shaving is useful, most of the times it just keeps me from getting anything done.

Why not both? I want good defaults, and also the ability to change the things that I might want tweaked for whatever reason down the line. A powerful preferences interface is the software equivalent of opening up the hood of a car -- just because I want it to run well doesn't mean I'm not gonna poke around.

About your cars reference, there's a funny segment from an old Top Gear where the presenters beat everyone at the modified cars drag strip race using a stock Bentley.

Everyone else poured thousands of hours and thousands of dollars into their car. James May showed up with a stock Bentley - a big fat comfortable car - and won the day.

I suspect there is some hidden context there that hid his chances of pulling that off, in classic Top Gear asshole style.

> As an advanced user ... I want defaults that are good enough that I never want to change them.

Reminds me of the old linux joke: newbies use the default kernel because it 'just works'; power users compile their own kernels to get every last scrap of power possible; and advanced users use the default kernel because it 'just works'...

As the saying goes about MS Office, 99% of the users only use 1% of the features. But they all use a Different 1%.

What will be acceptable defaults to you may well drive me up the wall.

The term has a specific meaning in the context: letting the user drive the order of interaction instead of following a set sequence. Many early character based interfaces forced the user follow a specific process (think filling in a form field-by-field). We are now taking the paint/word processor/window manager interaction where we can click on anything we want any time for granted.

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