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Experimenting with graph based UI-s #1

 
If you imagine user interfaces becoming more and more capable, and on the other side programming languages becoming more and more human friendly, at some point they would just become one.

That was the idea of Spruce, Rye's "co-language", about which I haven't blogged here yet. It's a tree/graph based programming language idea still in it's infancy. It could (potentially) be seen as a programming language, or a text-based user interface and also as a graphical user interface. Only not of a "seek-aim-click-type" persuasion, that we are all so used to.

It's all just an experiment, but 2 weeks ago I decided to try something similar from the UI side. To try making what I imagined could be a graph based UI in the form of a keyboard-only task manager.

It consists of nodes inside nodes. One kind of a node is also a list of nodes which produces the tabs, the main list ans the "drop-downs". Relative navigation, as I call it uses four keys, each two on it's own hand so it can be very quick. Up and down traverse the sibling nodes, "x" goes into current node and "y" goes out of it.

So far it seems to function, so I will continue with other features I had in mind.


This is not on github yet, but Ryelang is.



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