Wandering Thoughts archives

2024-12-30

I'm firmly attached to a mouse and (overlapping) windows

In the tech circles I follow, there are a number of people who are firmly in what I could call a 'text mode' camp (eg, also). Over on the Fediverse, I said something in an aside about my personal tastes:

(Having used Unix through serial terminals or modems+emulators thereof back in the days, I am not personally interested in going back to a single text console/window experience, but it is certainly an option for simplicity.)

(Although I didn't put it in my Fediverse post, my experience with this 'single text console' environment extends beyond Unix. Similarly, I've lived without a mouse and now I want one (although I have particular tastes in mice).)

On the surface I might seem like someone who is a good candidate for the single pane of text experience, since I do much of my work in text windows, either terminals or environments (like GNU Emacs) that ape them, and I routinely do odd things like read email from the command line. But under the surface, I'm very much not. I very much like having multiple separate blocks of text around, being able to organize these blocks spatially, having a core area where I mostly work from with peripheral areas for additional things, and being able to overlap these blocks and apply a stacking order to control what is completely visible and what's partly visible.

In one view, you could say that this works partly because I have enough screen space. In another view, it would be better to say that I've organized my computing environment to have this screen space (and the other aspects). I've chosen to use desktop computers instead of portable ones, partly for increased screen space, and I've consistently opted for relatively large screens when I could reasonably get them, steadily moving up in screen size (both physical and resolution wise) over time.

(Over the years I've gone out of my way to have this sort of environment, including using unusual window systems.)

The core reason I reach for windows and a mouse is simple: I find the pure text alternative to be too confining. I can work in it if I have to but I don't like to. Using finer grained graphical windows instead of text based ones (in a text windowing environment, which exist), and being able to use a mouse to manipulate things instead of always having to use keyboard commands, is nicer for me. This extends beyond shell sessions to other things as well; for example, generally I would rather start new (X) windows for additional Emacs or vim activities rather than try to do everything through the text based multi-window features that each has. Similarly, I almost never use screen (or tmux) within my graphical desktop; the only time I reach for either is when I'm doing something critical that I might be disconnected from.

(This doesn't mean that I use a standard Unix desktop environment for my main desktops; I have a quite different desktop environment. I've also written a number of tools to make various aspects of this multi-window environment be easy to use in a work environment that involves routine access to and use of a bunch of different machines.)

If I liked tiling based window environments, it would be easier to switch to a text (console) based environment with text based tiling of 'windows', and I would probably be less strongly attached to the mouse (although it's hard to beat the mouse for selecting text). However, tiling window environments don't appeal to me (also), either in graphical or in text form. I'll use tiling in environments where it's the natural choice (for example, in vim and emacs), but I consider it merely okay.

sysadmin/WindowsAndMouseForMe written at 23:45:30;


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