Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop".
The baggage of TTY interfaces in textual interfaces and the "desktop" paradigm for GUI interfaces is preventing people from going back to actual first principles for designing personal computing interfaces.
Of course I do appreciate that since the title of the articles is minimalist desktop GUIs the assumption of "first principles of computing assuming a desktop analog" is baked into the article, I just think it's insufficient.
Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster.
There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites:
- Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in!
- SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years.
- Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick.
- Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback.
- ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route.
- Magit (https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.