Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

Re:Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Inte... by jamesrcole on Saturday August 04, 2018 @01:21AM (#17685491)

I agree. I've long thought that animation could potentially make it much clearer what's going on in Vim.

Like if the user types 'das' to delete the current sentence, and it quickly highlights the text to be deleted, and then shows it shrinking away, as the text that was following it moves in to take its place. (Obviously, you'd want the animation to happen pretty quickly).

Such animation could make it clearer what the command is doing, and this could also make it easier to tell if you'd accidentally typed a command that didn't do quite what you wanted.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Inte... by chin123 on Saturday August 04, 2018 @05:43AM (#17686144)

You might like kakoune, a vim-like editor which focuses on interactivity: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune It flips around a few of vim's operations (like for example, to delete a word, you do 'wd' and not 'dw'). This allows it to highlight the text before performing an operation, which makes what you're doing much clearer.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Inte... by petepete on Sunday August 05, 2018 @02:24AM (#17690006)

I love Kakoune. Vim muscle memory and not being able to work out how to have per-language settings (for indenting) were the only thinsg that stopped me from switching.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Inte... by Lio on Saturday August 04, 2018 @02:08AM (#17685615)

That’s great for someone watching over your sholder eg if you’re doing a product demo but less good if you’re on your own. There it just slows you down when you want to move on to the next task.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Inte... by jamesrcole on Saturday August 04, 2018 @02:10AM (#17685620)

I gave reasons why it could help the user themselves. (Here's another: for users learning Vim)

And why should it necessarily make things slower? The animation could be quite fast, and I don't see why such animations would necessarily need to block or hold up future inputs or animations. (I do think, though, that you'd need to actually try it out to see if it works in practice)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Inte... by Lio on Saturday August 04, 2018 @03:16AM (#17685782)

I agree it’s possible to have animations that add useful information and don’t block the user.

In practice they are rare, certainly in consumer products. I can think of more products with janky UIs than I can ones with insanely great UIs.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Inte... by brazzledazzle on Saturday August 04, 2018 @09:39AM (#17686795)

I think they'd be great for new users but we'd need to be able to turn them off. No matter how fast and intuitive an animation is it's never going to be as fast as no animation.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Inte... by Izkata on Saturday August 04, 2018 @04:28PM (#17688322)

I'd suggest just switching to movement first, by way of visual mode. "v" turns on visual mode, "as" selects/highlights the sentence, then "d" to delete it or escape to return to normal mode.

[ Parent | on HN ]