As a group, the people who write most of the code for Open Source GUIs have no idea what typical users want.
I’ve noted before the strength of Open Source is those who code can do anything they like. That’s also it’s primary weakness, because they can be quite hostile to the interests of typical users. A significant minority of them are hostile when you ask them if they care. The result is the debacle called GNOME 3.
GNOME 3 will be pushed through simply because the number of folks involved is huge, and there is a significant minority of users who are mindless fanboys. They don’t take a clue from the multiple forks from GNOME which arose shortly after they offered their vision of the future. GNOME 3 will ensure a whole lot fewer people stick with the GNOME Project and start switching to other GUIs.
As other writers have noted, not a single user (as opposed to coder) has ever complained about “clutter.” They love it. It’s the developer who waxes poetic about “uncluttered” interfaces. What that actually means is free of anything they aren’t interested in adding, fixing and maintaining. In other words, I am charging the GNOME Project leadership and developers with being cranky misanthropes determined to make everyone do things the way they imagine humans ought to do. They are chasing the fantasy of reshaping the world to their liking. Down to some of the smallest details.
So let’s do this: You want “uncluttered”? Try the framebuffer CLI. That’s uncluttered. Nice, black screen with monospaced text in a handful of colors. No clutter there! And if just one project somewhere was born which promised they were going to try to create a TUI, a real text user interface, fully mouse-able, porting over some subset of features from GUI applications, I’d send them as much money as I could. I’d go out fundraising for them. I’d have no trouble finding more who would join me, people who, unfortunately, don’t write code.
It won’t happen, of course, because the only people who want such a thing are users, not developers. The idea Open Source coders would actually care what users want is a pipe dream. The alternative is no better, but for totally different reasons.
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I’ve always liked screen, except for its lack of interaction with the mouse and esoteric command key combinations. I’ve been introduced to tmux, but I have yet to explore it. If you find someone with that TUI, let me know 🙂
I looked over the site and reviews of tmux. It’s a start in the right direction, but without the mouse, it still lacks something critical to normal computer operations. I’ve noticed very few ncurses programs use the mouse; I know it’s possible to program mouse events, but it seems most of the mouseable stuff is in slang, MC being a very notable example. The other thing I really would want to see is overlapping virtual windows on the console. Some displays aren’t quite 160 characters wide, but parallel windows with each 80(+) characters wide would require a way to overlap and raise one to the front at a time. Let’s say I am using Lynx and Vim together; I prefer both to be 80 characters wide. It’s not necessary, but really useful. Otherwise, I can simply open multiple terminal sessions and switch back and forth, as I did in one previous experiment. That would obviate the use of tmux, of course.
I like tmux since I can use shell scripts with it easily. The ‘tmux’ command can be used to send arbitrary commands to the tmux daemon, which then controls the terminal ouptut.
I use Gnome-shell + gtile extension + tmux to manage about 2-3 terminal windows. I typically only run tmux out of one terminal window though.