[geeks] Nokia is getting the Rick Belluzzo treatment...

[der Mouse]

>> But when I use a UI that's actually designed around my preferences,
>> the difference is, yes, amazing.  When I recently started sharing an
>> office, my officemate remarked, after a while, that my weird-looking
>> UI just looked weird at first, but after watching me use it, he
>> could see how it and I got along and how effective it made me (and I
>> it).  (Not that that's surprising, because it's my own design,
>> co-evolved with my tastes over the past 20-25 years.)
> Do share details of it... there is enough in the above to get a hint
> of a custom 'tiled' window manager but I am made more curious by the
> half completed description.

Heh.  I didn't go into details because it's unlikely to be suited to
anyone else.  But, sure.

First thing that's apparent on looking at it is that (a) "it's all
text" (which it isn't quite, but it's pretty close) and (b) "does that
display not do colour?" (I don't use colours other than black and white
most of the time, and it's white-on-black; large areas of bright in my
visual field are annoying).

It's mostly terminal emulators with one-pixel borders.  No title bars.
When I want to do something like move a window, I use modified mouse
clicks ("modified" as in, modifier keys like control held down).  I
shift keyboard focus from window to window through a paradigm that
associates a select key (such as a letter) with one or more windows;
typing a distinguished key (I use F8) and that letter steps through
those windows.  (There is usually only one window per select key.)

The window manager is not tiling; windows can and often do overlap
partially.  It does not, however, do icons; the notion of minimizing a
window does not exist.  Instead, I just bury windows I don't want to
deal with at the moment - or not, if the window(s) I do want to do deal
with don't happen to obscure the one(s) I don't.  ("Icons belong in
shrines.  Menus belong in restaurants.")

There are no mouse gestures to do things like start new windows; such
things are done by typing commands into existing windows.  (This means
that if all command-line windows are gone, there is no way to start
more, short of things like sshing in from another machine.  This has
not proved to be an issue in practice.)

All the X clients are my own code - terminal emulator, window manager,
clock, root window background maintainer, connection front end, etc.  I
can go days without using any of the programs from the X distribution,
save for the X server itself.  (Unless you count the X libraries
against which my software is linked as "programs".)

> Also wouldn't mind a description of your personal 'workflow'.

I'm not sure what I can usefully say here.  I don't think of myself as
having a workflow, absent a particular task, and then it's generally
tuned to the task.

Email I read (and send) with a runs-in-a-terminal-emulator user agent
of my own design and coding, philosophically similar to mh (many small
programs rather than one large one) but completley different in detail.
I don't use "productivity tools" like spreadsheets or WYSIAYG word
processors; there are very few tasks at which they actually improve my
productivity, and those tasks I seldom have any reason to want to do.
I depend heavily on shell pipelines; I've had people watching me
express astonishment at the one-liners I routinely toss off, like

mcgrep "session opened" log | awk '{print $7;}' | xargs -kX mcgrep -h -1 "target = " userdata/X | awk '{print $4;}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head

(a hypothetical but plausible exmaple).

> I'm always looking to be more productive, and I guess there are a lot
> of folks on the list who also think the same way.

If you think my tools might help you, you're welcome to try them.  Most
of them are available to anyone who cares to fetch them from
ftp.rodents-montreal.org; there are a few, the ones I've worked on
recently and put under revision control, are available by git clone
from git://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/Mouse/TOOL where TOOL can be any of
a longish list, of which only a handful are really relevant to this
discussion: bme, disas, emacs, mterm, tar, xshowppm, and xxscope are
the only ones that strike me as very relevant.  There are others
available from git://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/TOOL (without the Mouse),
where TOOL can be compare, copytolog, fsm, librop, livebackup, mcgrep,
moussh, pwdb, or webip - of varying degrees of relevance here.  (When
poking around the FTP site - which, actually, is available over HTTP as
well, if you prefer; see http://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/ for that view
of it - your attention is directed in particular to /mouse/X,
/mouse/hacks, and /mouseware.)

You may have trouble building them.  I tend to write for my environment
and, often without even realizing it, depend on aspects of it not
shared by others.  The pieces necessary are generally there, but
exactly where they are is not always obvious; I can explain and/or
point you at the missing bits as necessary.

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