I am currently typing on a desktop that looks... well... some might find themselves highly disturbed by it.

Yeah, I came home, saw the /. article, and thought I'd amuse myself. (I am old enough to remember similar efforts years ago by the fvwm95 team, and associated projects, but this seems far more comprehensive in terms of overall effect, although still not 100% with some interface details I happened to notice during my 5 minute perusal.)

Already though, I find myself feeling caged in by the interface. I'll take my multiple virtual desktops and customized keyboard mappings over the task bar and start menu any day, thank you. (Still, this does bring back nostalgia for the days when I considered Windows 95 to have a "wonderful" interface. And it did, compared to 3.1 and the various DOS kludgeries I had used prior to that.)

Suddenly, I wonder what I will be thinking 8 years from now. Will the desktop interface I currently use seem as pathetic and constraining as this? Or has evolution mostly plateaued to the degree that we won't be seeing many more drastic improvements in the near future? Or, could I have become set in my ways enough that finding better, more efficient interfaces won't be a priority for me, even if they do come into existence? Who's to say?

Heh. Actually, now that I think about it, many of the "tweaks" I've made over the years to make my computer usage easier, more efficient, or what have you, have not been technologies that are truly new in terms of recent invention, but me "discovering" or learning to use stuff that has been around for ages. A few examples?

• vi. It's been around forever, but upon initial inspection, I never would have thought it would make editing text easier and faster than the "traditional" ways of shift-arrow, shift-delete, move cursor, shift-insert to cut and paste text (one tiny example). The mind boggles.
• Dvorak keyboard layout. Ya'll know the history, right? It's been around almost since the dawn of typing, but was originally not used with mechanical typewriters because it made people too fast. Then, when computers came around, most stuck with what they do. Now, those of us who have learned it would never go back.
• While we're on the subject of keyboard layouts...
  
  xmodmap -e "keycode 0x31 = Escape asciitilde"
  xmodmap -e "keycode 0x09 = grave asciitilde"
  
  Since I started 3 or 4 years ago (can't quite remember exactly when), it's probably saved my pinky a combined total of many miles of travel back and forth. (And no, I can't really claim credit for this idea, as wiser keyboard designers have been doing it that way for years.)
• Multiple virtual desktops. Don't know exactly how long they've been in existence. I could guess they've been around a while, since I know many wm's had them before I got into Linux/X11. (Though there are programs that provide the functionality under Windows, they just don't seem to have taken off on a very wide scale. Typically, you don't see them on the desktops of random Windows users nearly as often as Linux users. Could it just be a case of people sticking with default settings, or something? Come to think of it, my dad's MacOS X system, despite all its other niceties, doesn't appear to have this feature built in either. Hmmmm... Odd, because I can't imagine living day-to-day without it.)

Blah blah. I dunno what else. Tabbed browsing, anyone? :)

Seems like a lot of the efficiency stuff I've acquired over the years has been minor things. Assigning various keyboard mappings for little things that I just got in a habit of using. Truthfully, if anyone else sat down at my system and tried to start doing anything, they'd probably find themselves just as lost and constricted as I find myself when I use other people's computers. (Even when it's same OS, window manager, and keyboard layout, I frequently find myself fumbling around a lot whenever I get in front of anybody else's console.)

Hmmmm... That hostname doesn't seem to resolve right now, although I know it used to for a while. I'll leave the link in anyway, just to be stupid. ya'll know what I mean, right? (The alternative would be to throw in some JavaScript onmouseover crap that screams, "Ziyal!" whenever anybody looks at it. Actually..... I will now go back and do just that. Hah! Is that annoying, or what?)

I think it's getting to be my bedtime now. Gotta sleep so I can pull another busy shift tomorrow, er, today. Whatever.

Goodnight, and peace. (The latter being the operative word, given the current world situation. ditto to that.)

I'm outta here.