as a professional maker of bad keyboards, I'd like to show my appreciation for Steelseries's idea to organize a keyboard /categorically/.

POPQUIZ: what category is "enter" under?

one of the problems with being a retrocomputerist is how often I use a 2025 program and think "this program would be just as functional and 10 times as nice to use if you'd written it for windows 95"

The answer is Editing

which contains: Enter, Escape, Backspace, Tab, Space, and Delete.

also note that this dialog box is:
1. slightly too small to show all the categories, even before you start expanding them
2. non-resizable

I don't think this is an oversight, rather it's a technical limitation:

Their ad-hoc windowing system in this Electron container doesn't support resizable pop-up windows.

So I've been hacking on DOS programs a lot recently and it's really made me realize HOW MUCH CODE they have to spend on basic windowing code! but DOS didn't have a GUI, so every program that needed it had to implement it themselves.

And then later, with Windows providing all that code, they only have to write the application-specific code, saving a lot of development and maintenance work.

thank goodness we haven't backslid on the quality of our graphical user interfaces by making everything a fucking webpage.

@foone it's fine, though, because everyone just embeds 14MB of JavaScript (that has zero cache control headers, so it gets downloaded and parsed on every page load) to provide a half-arsed GUI toolkit. Further, since there are more of these libraries than there are JS developers, no two sites look, feel, or behave the same.

*takes deep, relaxing breath*

Thankyou, I feel better now.

@womble byte for byte it'd probably be smaller and more consistent to just embed a copy of DOSBox and Windows 3.1.

I should prototype that as a joke: a new GUI solution for the web... it's just windows 3.1 in an emulator!

@foone @womble It would likely also be easier to develop for as you could use stuff like Delphi or Visual Basic.

@foone @womble
Not a joke, I've got a half* completed project to convert an old win32s application to mobile Web by doing exactly that: In-browser emulated DOS and Windows, set with default shell being the app concerned.

*more like 15%.. All this front-end stuff is outside my comfort zone, plus I've not worked out how to get networking going yet.

@womble @foone HTTP should add the FUCK_YOU method. You can use that to give some gentle feedback to some websites.

Or, as has been said a million times already: people developing this kind of stuff should be forced to use only 14K4 network connections.

@foone meanwhile games are still writing all their own GUI code to this day 😩
@eniko @foone but on the plus side games often build interfaces like they actually care if they're any good or not, which is really something
@foone
True greatness would be to change the text in the arch/ribbon to "HALL OF FOONE"
@foone they put a web browser in the fucking mouse driver
@foone there are like 13 bad decisions summed up as a limitation in that sentence
@foone Electron was such a mistake.
@foone That dialog box sounds like a hate crime.
@foone I don’t understand why they don’t just show a keyboard so you can select the key you want.
@foone Escape??
@alilly @foone Must have been built by a vim user

@foone

the first time i ever did data entry work was on a Wyse terminal connected to some COBOL mainframe, and it was the only time i've encountered enter and return doing different things. "enter" literally meant "enter the data on the screen as a record", and return was likewise just a carriage return.

@foone huh, how are Enter, Backspace and Tab not on the "Arrow" category, where they clearly belong? 🧐
@foone, but not Return? FAIL.
@foone me whenever I see most of post skeunorphic mobile apps
@foone and probably faster. My favorite part of modern day terminal apps is how snappy they are.

@foone

this program would be just as functional and 10 times as nice to use if you’d written it for windows 95

Real.