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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

There's something a little humorous about a new VR system whose primary feature is how well it can display VT100 emulators.

I don't know anyone who used MS Windows when their software was all still MS-DOS programs. Windows really took off when programmers started writing programs designed to take advantage of the native GUI paradigm.

Likewise, VR is never going to be accepted as a practical user interface until it moves beyond the concept of "windows". I fully believe it's possible to make a great VR user interface, but I can't believe it's going to look anything like some rectangles floating in space.

This could be a VR-fvwm. What we really need is a VR-GTK+.

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Programmers work with text and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Terminal based editors are powerful, so properly displaying terminal is a great goal.

What would a non-rectangular UI for manipulating text look like?

I'm not sure I agree with the parent, but to give an example for a non-rectangular UI for manipulating (programming) text: Combine structural editing[1] overlaid on some kind of 3d graph that shows how your entire codebase fits together.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA

> Programmers work with text and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Programmers work with 2D overlapping windows and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I'm giving a criterion for when that's going to change. They're connected. You can't beat a 2D display for displaying 2D data.

> What would a non-rectangular UI for manipulating text look like?

Looked at a DOM Inspector recently (HTML)? Or Computed Styles (CSS)? Or Network Activity (HTTP)? All of the most common text formats I use, I view through a non-text interface. These aren't inherently 2D data streams -- that's just what we do because they're being put on a 2D display. All of them would be even more useful in 3D.

That's not even counting the biggest classical use for an extra dimension: time, e.g., version control history, animation state, or database transactions or migrations.

I don't really do much frontend web programming, so those examples don't resonate much with me. I see your point, though, with your last examples.

It's still very difficult for me to imagine how I would translate interfaces I'm used to into another dimension. Even if I picture something floating in front of me, I only perceive a 2D projection of it. Perhaps with clever transparency or by rotating it around I could receive more information than I would in 2D.

I feel like a character in Flatland, I stuck in my own dimension.

I love using terminals and I've always wanted a VR window manager so I've put some thought into how it could work.

I've always envisioned an infinite 2D plane. I would love a terminal that stretches off forever above me, like the Star Wars opening text. Or a spreadsheet that goes on forever in 2 dimensions.

You could also embed your 2D-non-euclidean spaces in 3D. Want to enforce 80 character line wrapping? write on the surface of a cylinder that literally wraps around after 80 characters.

Another idea could be to use depth instead of colours for syntax highlighting. Comments could pop out of the page.

I think there are a lot of possibilities.

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