The Only Intuitive Interface Is The Nipple
10 points by bediger4000
10 points by bediger4000
Expanding on the previous comment, I believe there is a lot of shame involved when a child doesn't take to the nipple, so it's not surprising that a dude on the internet in the early 1990s wouldn't really know that it's not, in fact, a 100% succesful deployment in all cases.
Adding to this, to the degree that breastfeeding behavior is hardwired, it works on literal reflexes, not intuition. If you rub your hand on a newborn's cheek, it will turn its head towards that side, the so-called "root reflex". To me, reflexes sit at an even lower level than intuition. Intuition is a thought that comes naturally and effortlessly to you, reflexes bypass thought altogether.
From the story title, I thought this was about the red ThinkPad TrackPoint pointer, informally known as "the nipple". I'm slightly disappointed that it's not. I quite like them, and find them awfully convenient.
I like them too, although TBH for about 30 years now I've been referring to them as a Centrally Located Input Tool. It seems much more apt than "nipple" to me.
But a tiny anecdote as to its intuitiveness or lack thereof:
In 2014 I emigrated to Czechia. I bought a Thinkpad X200 as my travel "weapon of choice". Lovely little thing, the best laptop ever made. A couple of years later I'd integrated enough that I went hiking in the mountains with a group of local friends. One trip we discovered one weekend evening that it was a public holiday, the tiny village we were in had no open shops or restaurants – pub, yes, but that's because Czechia – but no food.
We decided to order pizza. I had the only laptop. Running Ubuntu with Unity. I signed in, opened Firefox. They tried to use it to find a pizza restaurant. A huddle formed, arguing in Czech so I didn't follow what was going on at all closely. After 5 min of rising stress levels, a woman turned to me and said "Liam! How do we use this thing? There's no mouse!"
They'd been flailing with the keyboard and making a little progress but nobody in the group even noticed the Trackpoint let alone tried it. When I showed them how it worked, they tried. Several swaps of System Operator occurred. Everyone struggled massively.
Despite basically not being able to read a word of Czech at this point, I had to do all the ordering... [Sigh]
Intuitive they are not.
I only use Lenovo notebooks for personal use and I always use the TrackPoint when I'm on the road. The TrackPad stays disabled because my arms sometimes accidentally move the mouse. I also have the TrackPoint speed set to a ridiculously fast speed. So even people who know what it is are totally lost when they try to use my notebook 😂
Nope, they're not. And they're not even a guaranteed "acquired taste" either. I've used various Thinkpads over the years and always had that Trackpoint stare at me, so once in a while I gave it an honest attempt. But it never really worked for me. I was always much slower and less accurate with it than with a mouse, even after some practice.
Then again, I think I'm some kind of fake nerd, because all the nerdy UI stuff seems to not work for me. I've genuinely tried both vim and emacs and about 5 different tiling window managers and none of it has ever "clicked".
Oh my. I turn off the trackpad on my Thinkpads. I much prefer the Trackpoint, and it has a 3rd mouse button, which is a massive win. The 3rd button is vastly useful under Linux, and still quite handy in Windows.
Open web links in a background tab, quickly and efficiently.
Middle-click the titlebar to send the current window behind all the others. Windows can do this with the free Taekwindow which does not even need installation, so you can use it without admin rights.
Middle-click to insert the currently-selected text at the cursor. Copy both the text and the URL of a web link in 1 operation with no round-trip.
Vim and Emacs are '70s junk to me. Don't waste your time. Their advocates all have terminal Stockholm Syndrome. (Terminal -- get it? They work in the terminal?)
I also use a Thinkpad. Three-finger tap/click on the trackpad is the same as the middle-click, at least on KDE Wayland. I use it all the time for the first and third uses you mention.
When docked, I actually use an external Apple Magic Trackpad rather than a mouse.
Three-finger tap/click on the trackpad is the same as the middle-click
I don't use trackpads if I have a choice, but yes, I am aware of the gesture. I also use a work=-provided MacBook Air where I have no choice. MacOS does not offer it.
There are 3rd party apps which offer it. Being the Mac world, there's a little paid app which is cheap, but I've never used it because there's also a FOSS one that does me just fine.
So I know the gesture. I now try to use it on other machines which lack 3rd buttons. Personally I find it infuriating. It's extremely hard for me to get any trackpad, Apple or otherwise, to register a 2-finger tap, let alone a 3-finger tap. It rarely works first time and so I need to try 2 or 3 or more times. It's also horribly imprecise and I have little to no idea where I am triple-clicking. Often I move the pointer slightly.
It is such a massive pain to use, I will usually use a modifier key on the keyboard instead, even if that means putting down my cuppa or whatever. And if I am, miserably, forced to work on a machine with a trackpad full time for a while, I will bring a mouse with me. I also hate wireless mice but the MBA only has 2 USB ports, and so I need a hub as well.
Summary: not an alternative for me, and it's the falling domino that sets off a cascade of side-effects with the end result of, if possible, using a different computer.
I mean I also don't like trackpads. I just carry a mouse with me in my laptop bag. And of course that enables middle-click as well, which I use a lot.
You can keep your nerd card!
Having spent the first 15 years of my career using vi on 80x24 terminals the absolute last thing I want to use as my daily driver is a modal UI.
You immigrated. Emigrate is something you leave from.
Yes, I left from the UK and before I left I bought myself a laptop with a UK keyboard, you see.
Then in your story, you would have emigrated from the UK. You were an immigrant in Czechia.
Yes, I get the difference, but the point and the relevance here is that I left my homeland. It's not really where I went, but where I left.
I do understand the penchant for pedanticism, or perhaps even pedantry, but it seems to me that you're missing the emphasis here, which I placed where I did for a reason. A reason I now regret, but there we go.