Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if people actually remember how native apps are supposed to look like on any of the major platforms… Mac users, maybe. For all other platforms, churn and barely contained web apps are really wreaking havoc on the benefit of a uniform look and – most importantly – feel.

View on HN

I'm a KDE user who really likes the classic Oxygen theme, and it's annoying when certain applications (e.g. Eclipse) just look way out of place. I managed to find a decent GTK port of the theme so even Emacs and Firefox are quite well-behaved.

No idea what a Windows app looks like, though, I recently fixed my grandfather's Windows 8 laptop and immediately gave up trying to understand how theming is meant to work.

(As another KDE user) I'll second this. Electron-based apps seems to be the worst culprits -- ignore my preference settings for max/min/close buttons, frequently do away with the title bar altogether leaving me with no window resize/move and hiding away Application/Window settings options, no regard for themeing,... it's become a significant (read: near deal-breaker) for me trying out new apps.

The massive changes in native UIs look and feel over the last couple decades really has made me double down on the CLI as the best interface. The CLI and the terminal are well established UIs with no big changes in a long time. The last big development I can think of is the use of sub-commands in addition to the normal command line call parameters.

I now focus on making my shell/terminal environment as good as possible and ignore GUI land whenever possible. Which today pretty much means 99% of the time I'm running a bunch of terminals and a couple web browsers.

Visually it's not that different, of course, but I don't see a more unified interface in the terminal these days. The Amiga might have had it, with its TRIPOS arg parsing, and of course you got your language-integrated text UIs like Oberon.

But beyond that, it's a mirror of the graphical side. I mean, it's not like the GUI invented a lot of new widgets, either. There are still buttons and menus, it's just that they look and behave differently in each app. The same goes for the CLIs, where there's no rhyme or reason for all the long/short parameters, sub-commands etc.; To use the git metaphor, we're in a bathroom where all the porcelain is coming from different manufacturers and your got your brutalist toilet bowl next to your gold plated sink. And nobody knows what to do with the three shells.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com