What I know about computer UI/UX philosophy

Created Wednesday 28 January 2026

Welcome to what will actually be the inaugural KSMP minisite, FiloComp.trd.is, "Computer Philosophy", actually mostly UI philosophy.

This page was first authored in English. Translations, where available, are not authoritative, though every effort is made to ensure they can be used as though they were.

All headings are hyperlinked to themselves, and you can right click and select «copy link location» (or whatever the action is to put a hyperlink into the cutbuffer in your user agent) in order to share a link to a specific heading.

What is UI/UX?

UI/UX is a multidisciplinary topic, cutting all the way from hardware, both layout and computational capability, OS kernels, through libraries and programming languages, into textual, auditory and graphical presentations of data, and graphical layout, including the images used to represent items like buttons as well as how those items are distributed across a screen. The voices of text-to-speech engines are also touched, as are, hypothetically writing systems for and TTSes for sign languages, converting one visual representation into another. It is additionally a discipline of presenting data and possible operations coherently.

A bad design low in the stack can ruin everything higher in the stack, forcing non-optimal abstractions.

«Secure interaction design»

Thoughts on security. web.archive.org/web/20080213124802/http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/sid/

A word on dark patterns from our Mastodon acquaintance Thommy Webb

«Yes» and «maybe later» isn't just bad UI, it's a lack of understanding of agency. This according to mastodon.social/@thomasjwebb/116001798046452768 Thommy Webb's post. We tend to agree. They further relate that their grandmother covered her computer's webcam with tape.

The OFM pseudo-standard

We don't consider orthodox file managers to be good UI/UX, and we have a lot of bad things to say about SoftPanorama, but the SoftPanorama standard for OFMs is informative because it contains many tenets which we do believe are essential to good UI/UX (scriptability, every program should have its own REPL even if its job seems to be extremely diverse from programming.) softpanorama.org/OFM/Standards/ofm_standard1999.shtml

We intend to design and build a navigational file manager which contains several conscious nods to OFM '99 and later.

Ableists.

Yeah, there are ableists who are thinking in this space. It sucks.

Loper-OS

Links to that person's website and analyses of his posts are placed in a containment zone at /loper-os.

UI/UX and disability justice

I am of the opinion that good UI/UX is a disability justice issue. Maximizing human capability requires maximizing the capability of all humans, not just the ones who are at baseline quite well capable already. The relevant actions taken will also in many cases result in those at baseline being more capable. For instance, if I manage to make Tcl/Tk apps AT-SPI accessible as well as screen-readable through a custom bus (they currently aren't on Unix, but that sort of accessibility is a requirement for Umbrellix Desktop Tool certification, which is something I intend to start issuing some time in the early 2030s), I could detect in a chorded keyset driver that you've been typing into a textbox for too many characters, and the driver could be configured - off by default, turn it on once you've learned the keyset - to ask the user: «Try switching to the keyboard, if you can. It'll be faster.» or if they have a steno keyboard, «Try switching to your stenotype, if you can. It'll be faster.». Of course, this functionality could also be used to make spyware, which isn't ideal. Means of detecting that, and exposing to the user the fact that it's happening, and giving them a chance to make it stop, must be available. (This was the original purpose of "antivirus" on many computing platforms.)

Accursed Farms' Mother of All Rants

Accursed Farms, a YouTuber and inveterate gamer, put together what I consider to be the Mother of All Rants on the matter of GUI. He proposes some not very good UI ideas (like the hand-control based stuff and various forms of extreme motion control, those quickly lead to exhaustion) and shows how his Windows 7 setup looks. He appeals for help from experts. www.accursedfarms.com/posts/other-videos/guivideo/

The Doug Engelbart Institute

Formerly the Bootstrap Institute. Continues the legacy of Doug Engelbart. Hypertext is now a household term, albeit under a different header (the Web). The keyset basically died as an input device. Hyperdocuments are still a long way off (even this page is not one!).

Their website can be seen at dougengelbart.org/

Its online magazine, run on a Wordpress, is called the «Collective IQ Review» - not a good look in an era where IQ is basically discredited. collectiveiq.wordpress.com/

Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos

The Mother of All Demos must be mentioned here for completeness. It is available as 7.5 gigabytes of data ripped from three DVDs from the Internet Archive. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

The sequel to the MOAD is another 7GB.

Chorded keysets

Any mention of the MOAD or its daughter w/o a mention of chorded keysets is inherently incomplete. We include an assorted linkdump (in many cases taken from Wikipedia references) on anything we can find re: chorded keysets. Open Steno (Plover) is relevant because it uses 23- to 46-key, two-handed chorded keysets to achieve typing performance exactly equivalent to court and accessibilty stenography, as well as both IME and text editing program commands.

web.archive.org/web/20150316050101/http://www.thehypertext.com/2014/12/09/stenogloves-part-iii/ (found on a Reddit page; the actual website has since become hijacked with what is conceivably drawn CSAM)

My thoughts on stenography, even not entirely related to computer text input.

Everything around NLS, Augment, Hyperscope etc.

Any mention of the MOAD without NLS and its children is inherently incomplete.

We maintain a page, not completely related to this site but on it for organizational reasons, where we list links to information we have been able to find about NLS, Augment and its children (collectively NLS technologies) /augment

Text editor program control

Of some note is Alex Levchuk's Vim clutch, a programme-specific text editor control operated with the feet. Information is available at github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch.

More general on hypertext

It pains an acquaintance of ours to see a ScribbleHub novel where the author has tried to embed high-quality fanart, and the result has been all too often that the fanart is hosted on Twitter or Discord, and thus now inaccessible. adhd.irenes.space/@ireneista/statuses/01KGP4XJ87AQD6QCK26QBD3VX0 The Irenes further comment on how this is because what was once a basic skill for a creative - putting an image on your own web server - is no longer taught. The reason we decided to link this is because this, too, is UI/UX.

The ladder metaphor

There's a cloud of ideas that's been swirling around in our head. It's not original, it's gone by a million names in a million mouths, but to us it's «the ladder metaphor». It encompasses...

Self-teaching UI

the idea that a GUI program is supposed to be to some extent self-teaching (if there's more than one way to do things, each way should, if it makes sense to, reference the others - this is already exemplified in putting keyboard-shortcut legends wrong-side-justified in menubar menus; GNU nano, a textual GUI text editor, has a two line cue card at the bottom of its screen in the default configuration), as well as...

Flexibility to complex tasks and new ways of doing things

the idea that you are supposed to be able to reach high heights in a program and/or suite where that makes sense (advanced functions scriptability, as a form of being able to design your own experience both at a high level and at a specific level. Scriptability might add new toolbar buttons to do compound actions, or it might be used to add keyboard shortcuts thought more ergonomic. It could also add entirely new functions, new markup to a program that uses markup, entirely new interaction paradigms like using a chorded keyset to change views or correct typos, etc.). Deriving good use should not require great competence, but great efficiency in achieving complex desired tasks that involve the program in question should be possible, without again and again having to recourse to the REPL (which, however, should at all times and in all programs be available, ideally using a scripting language common across the entire system).

A note on software system authorship

In a very real sense, not just copyrightly, you as a software author are really a coauthor of millions of software environments, most of which you will never use, coauthoring with millions or billions of authors who you will never meet. Some of those coauthors don't even know they are authoring a computing system with anyone, or at all.

Original Mastodon post at mastodon.top/@ellenor2000/116016510677681193