Thursday, 01/12/2023

19:46 today's rough

if i don't work out and get up early, and get to talk to new people every day, i have a lot of trouble socializing. at the coffee shop she kept complimenting my supreme hoodie - "i've never seen one like it before", etc - but I had no idea how to respond. This used to be a pattern for me, but I broke out of it by getting up early and interacting with lots of poeple - something I haven't done at all over break. I need to relearn these skills and always be so open to interacting with people face-to-face - these relationships with people online are just unhealthy otherwise.

20:46 ui

i'm finally reaching my ui flow again with a couple of upgrades and running emacs as a daemon. we're a lot faster now - maybe some linux kernel update? - but there is still so much work to do on the desktop interface.

every program i use commits this cardinal sin of nesting window managers. I love the ergonomics of something like Emacs - and I'll continue to use it as a text editor - but using it to manage windows and the OS just isn't practical. Anything that uses tabs or windows should use the same interface to manage them!

Concretely -

• My git program (mostly magit) should open in a WM-managed window, and its file previews should open in another program still
• hidden tabs or buffers should be managed by the WM, not as emacs buffers
• emacs is probably the fastest way I know to manage wm buffers, and has a super nice interface for managing terminal commands, but because of all of its lexacy contents (and purpose) its not meant ot take over the whole system and run expressive gui apps.

in short, i want to bring the emacs workflow to the window manager, and add expressive keyboard shortcuts, etc

22:16 other ui notes

my arrow keys are way too far away lol whats a better way of triggering them? a shortcut? pressing two keys at once? chording feels far more ergonomic than some key combination; it 'flows' better, it feels just like the staccato or rolling nature of typing, and it's almost more natural in that way; the keyboard feels and sounds very similar when chording as it does when

22:48 some things to build

• mod+? to view all of your globally defined keyboard shortcuts
• way to view all of those keyboard shortcuts: i want to be able to draw over windows with a relatively flexible format, and have some api(?) or hardcoded thing to render lists or groups of structured data in a popup window on the screen, or perhaps a menu above/below (i like the evil emacs keyboard shortcut hints/descriptions a lot, but sometimes we also want more screen real estate, plus its easier to bring up everything on the center of the screen)
• i think eventually we end up building up to a desktop manager kind of system lol - we probably also want a login manager - but we want to build this to support heterogenous software to start, and we want to do a damn good job of it

how do we inject fun?

• personal, animated assistant
• animations and transitions throughout. what does a joyful animation?
• sound effects for everything. maybe some sort of synth that adapts as you type to what you're doing, in some abstract sense, and motivates you vocally

feed into a metaphor for the kitchen, or the lab, or the music studio, not the desktop; the desktop is where you do boring business things. i want to feel like i'm chefing up some fire every time i use my device, and i watn to assemble modular tools myself.

What about a box of toys? Legos? We could extend this into some node system for workflows with blocks for automations built into the OS. Look back at previous notes for this.