> 60 years after Engelbart’s vision, 54 years a...
# linking-togetherf
Florian Schulz
03/20/2022, 8:29 AM60 years after Engelbart’s vision, 54 years after the Mother of all Demos, 41 years after the Desktop Metaphor, 34 years after HyperCard, 32 years after the introduction of the World Wide Web, 26 years after Macromedia Flash, 12 years after the iPad — why are we still stuck with this:
[Picture of an empty text editor].
The interface of a text editor is not only unsubstantial — it is non-existing. Nothing tells you anything. Why do we have to write code in order to create a visual product? Is there really no better user interface for designing visual and interactive experiences?
When it comes to design work, the text editor is Engelbarts brick-on-a-pencil. It de-augments our design work.https://borism.medium.com/tools-shape-our-products-fa121366dac4
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Kartik Agaram
03/20/2022, 3:18 PM
If coding is a way to liberate the design process from limitations of standardised software — then why do websites (still) look the same?
You just need to look a little further afield: https://whimsical.club
Kartik Agaram
03/20/2022, 3:24 PM
Notice also the tool used by the greatest masters for virtuoso acts of world building:
[picture of a typewriter]
Kartik Agaram
03/20/2022, 3:46 PM
Also, I'll put it to you that text editors -- full-screen, with a cursor you can move around -- are a visual tool. A moving cursor was in fact one of the things Engelbart's mother of all demos was showing off. Another good article that conveys what a wild, scifi-like advance they were: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/09/24/editor
Alright, I'll let y'all rant about visual programming languages now. Just don't try to pry my text editor out of my hands 😄
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David Brooks
03/20/2022, 6:08 PMimho there are 2-4 "natural" levels of granularity (coding in the large, coding in the small) wrt what we call programming. I feel that at the level of function, there is nothing thus far that offers a better way to create than editing text. But the "glue code" and the "module code" and the "distributed code" could theoretically all be handled in a graphical manner. At least that's my instinct, I haven't seen it in practice, though Node-RED and NoFlo come close to this idea.
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Chris G
03/20/2022, 7:18 PMOne of these text editors (Drafts) supports instant full regex text search against a database, tags findable via AND/OR, has workspaces with multiple levels of configuration, connects with any other iOS app, runs Shortcuts, has full javascripting and object model – along with a catalog of thousands of actions, scripts, themes, and language syntaxes
The other text editor (Ulysses) provides a folder structure that syncs per device and many types of cloud, is fully re-arrangeable, numerous writing modes and writing productivity tools – both of these run multi-window and side-by-side, for interesting sharing and drag-drop workflows – they both do far more than is healthy for a single-app to do, actually –
A weird world, these plain editors
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