[OT] The lessons of Ion

[Peter Alcibiades]

The interesting thing about ion is that it makes you think really hard 
about what is ease of use, what is user friendly, what about those famous 
laws, the HIG, and the one about where your points of clicking ought to be 
that I always forget the name of because I hate it so much.  Here is how 
Ion2 works.

It is sort of tangentially relevant because if you were packing a one app 
OS, and you wanted a one app window manager, basically an embedded Rev app, 
ion would be one way to do it.  As long as you do not have too many new 
windows overlapping, however.

You start out looking at a totally blank screen with a top border which 
says 'empty frame' at the top.  It is also totally black except this 
border, which is a quite attractive shade of blue/grey, with white 
lettering on it.  There are no clues what to do next.

You are an insider or have a crib sheet, and so you know that F1 brings up 
a man page, F2 opens a terminal (the second most important thing a guy 
needs in his interface), and F3 lets you launch an app by name, which is a 
nice to have but not essential, because real men launch from a terminal, of 
course.  

So lets say you go ahead, and you type in icewe followed by a tab.  It will 
complete to iceweasel, which is the Debian name for firefox (yes, you had 
to know that), and when you hit enter, firefox launches and occupies the 
entire screen.  OK, you think, how about mail?  So you hit F3 again, now 
you type in kmail, hit enter, and up pops your email.  In a tab, also 
occupying the entire screen. 

Now you have an idea.  Why don't we split the screen?  So now you do alt+k 
s.  instantly, your pane is split into two equal parts, vertically, one 
like the first, black with nothing in it, the other with your two tabs.  
You want to resize?  alt+r and use the arrow keys.  You want to kill a 
panel?  Just right click in the border and close.  Same thing for a tab.

You are geting bored and desperately want the full Debian menu?  F12 brings 
it up.

It sounds impossible, and rather ridiculous.  But here is what is amazing.  
There comes a point at which all this suddenly becomes automatic as a way 
of working.  You do not think about it or look for your crib sheet, you 
just enter a few characters, and things happen.  You never have one window 
behind another, nothing ever overlaps.  You get used to splitting up your 
panes just so, for instance a calculator always open in the top right of 
your three or four.  A file manager under it.  Then the main window.  A 
terminal someplace of course.

There are no, zero widgets.  No taskbar.  No clock or date.  Nothing to 
tell you about the status of the network.  What is F2 for, after all?  
Presumably one of your little panes someplace is always running a terminal, 
so who needs widgets?  There are not even any borders.  All you see is apps 
and a tiny little bar at the top telling yoiu which tab you are in by going 
a paler shade of blue grey.

I have to tell you, this is an experience to make you think and scratch 
your head and think some more.  If Apple were right, it should not work.  
If Gnome were right, it should not work.  And on day 1 it does not.  But on 
day n, it not only works, it feels just perfectly right and automatic, your 
fingers just do things, and you forget you are using Ion, its just how 
things are done here.

Try it.  You will never feel the same about HIGs and that guy and his silly 
law again.  Fitts he might have been.  And you will never again confuse 
being easy to use on day 1 for the ignorant with being easy to use  when 
you know it well and are experienced.  No, they are completely different 
things.

Ion is a bit under resourced at the moment, as Richard pointed out.  But 
for the deprived minimalist, there are other alternatives, most notably 
from the nosuck school of software, wmii, awesome, and a couple more of 
that ilk.  If you are interested enough to try ion, have a look at wmii and 
its associates too.  Anyone with a serious interest in man computer 
interfaces will find it worth the effort.

Peter