Hacker News Reader

You're comparing apples with oranges.

Terminal/DOS-based software isn't ugly, it's just a different interface (GUI vs. non-GUI).

Of course some technical people that know what they're doing will enjoy using the command line because you don't have a GUI that gets in the way, but using this fact to "prove" that people like ugly software better doesn't make sense—it's just a bad example.

View on HN

I worked for a very large corp that wanted to convert an application that we used to process applications. It took less than a second to process 99 percent of applications. They wanted to switch from a cli app to web. I told them they were nuts. We could currently process the days queue in minutes. Sure the company could have loaded all the data and used js to feed them out quickly, but the programmers had no idea what we were doing and certainly wouldn't have designed it correctly. The company wasn't changing it to be trendy, they were changing it to make things easier. It would have had the opposite effect.

Most people would describe terminal software as hideous.

Happiness comes from visual variety.

Are the blind happy?

Not blind, but I had eye surgery about a year and a half ago, followed by a recovery period about 4 weeks longer than I was told to expect, during which I came to appreciate things like contrast. Not coincidentally, I also realized my software was literally* painful to use for someone in my condition.

I have learned to give a shit about color choices.

*That's the literal 'literally', not the figurative one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com