3.3 KiB
Good things
Windows 95
Most applications followed design guidelines, giving a unified and simple UI.
Could be reasonably well controlled from the keyboard.
SerenityOS
A project with a much larger scope than Haven but with somewhat similar goals, to create a nice new environment. Gives proof that such a project can be written in few people, given proper experience.
ToaruOS
Similarly to SerenityOS, this proves that one can write an entire operating system from scratch. Somewhat sadly, it just replicates the Linux desktop without trying to make any fundamental changes whatsoever. Still, it makes for a very interesting data point.
Haiku
Pretty. Desktop-first. Just the window manager sucks, and C++ is no longer a reasonable choice for a high-level programming language, despite all the effort to improve it. It’s the foundations that are rotten.
VIM
Customizable modal text editor allowing for rather efficient editing. While the internals might not be so great, the user interface is hard to beat once you get used to it.
With vim-lsp it even shines as an IDE, which is a wonderful development.
Qt Creator
Has a very good VIM emulator (rare!), excellent code navigation on top of that, clean UI.
Primarily a C++ IDE, yet slowly the Language Server Protocol implementation makes it transcend into a general-purpose one.
Vimperator/Pentadactyl/qutebrowser
Vimperator/Pentadactyl has created a new standard in web browser usability. The most important innovations being the addition of modality to the web browser and the "follow link" feature, which is what I feel all mouse-first UIs deserve.
Too bad it can no longer work in current versions of Firefox as they cut off all support for XUL addons. The good times are already behind us. I certainly enjoyed them.
qutebrowser went somewhat beyond in terms of how neat the integration of a VIM interface and a web browser engine can be, rebuilding the concept on top of Webkit, but to this day it lacks a normal AdBlock, and thus remains a toy.
SourceHut
Drew might be an opinionated asshole but that’s not necessarily a bad quality. His creations are compatible with my values.
WikiWikiWeb
An interesting knowledge base. Simple formatting, automatic links. I’ve borrowed the general concept for this very collection of texts (I don’t want to say "wiki" since no one else can edit).
It’s a shame that it’s been frozen in time.
AsciiDoc
I despise Markdown for its choices, and I don’t want to suffer while writing. Granted, I can see some faults in AsciiDoc as well, notably with how hard it is to parse and process, but I haven’t found anything better yet. One day I might create a processor for a slightly modified subset of it. Until then, libasciidoc is what I’ll be using for all markup.
Plan 9, Go
Pervasive simplicity. Sometimes it’s annoying but overall you get the feeling you have the entire platform under your control.