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