We need to tease out several different things here. In my opinion:
- Information density is good. If you can stuff more data on screen, by using annotations, underlines, fringe markers, whatnot - it's usually a win. As long as the indicators don't interfere with each other, human brain can quickly learn to filter them with near-zero effort.
- Clicking is bad ergonomics. It has high enough overhead compared to keyboard that it's enough to interfere with focus and the state of flow.
- Most animations are bad ergonomics. This, ironically, applies to the author's CodeRibbon[0]. It looks like a great idea. Then you think how to implement it in Vim/Emacs, with less animations. Then you realize that you can get this with some tweaks to how you switch buffer/window configurations, and it'll give you same benefits with better ergonomics.
- The article underexplores the third choice of the predator - enriching the environment. Or, perhaps, we should introduce a fourth choice[1]: meta-enrichment, or developing technology. That is, reconfiguring and extending your tooling to offer you more/different contextual cues (foraging), navigation tools (navigation) and operations (enrichment). This is where Emacs shines above all - for a proficient Emacs user, meta-enrichment is something one just does. Of course, as a developer living in Emacs, I suffer from confirmation bias[2] :).
[1] - Incidentally, one that distinguishes humans from the rest of life on Earth.
[2] - I mean, over the past year I spent about a week worth of time on developing what now is 1400 lines of Emacs Lisp[3] implementing some creature comforts, including a "control panel" for a particular flavor of development I'm doing. I could've avoided spending that week if I used VS Code instead, but then I'd also lose on all the benefits I get from a tool that fits like a glove.
[3] - That's 1400 lines of my own Elisp, on top of the ton of third-party elisp packages and customizations specific to them.
- Information density is good. If you can stuff more data on screen, by using annotations, underlines, fringe markers, whatnot - it's usually a win. As long as the indicators don't interfere with each other, human brain can quickly learn to filter them with near-zero effort.
- Clicking is bad ergonomics. It has high enough overhead compared to keyboard that it's enough to interfere with focus and the state of flow.
- Most animations are bad ergonomics. This, ironically, applies to the author's CodeRibbon[0]. It looks like a great idea. Then you think how to implement it in Vim/Emacs, with less animations. Then you realize that you can get this with some tweaks to how you switch buffer/window configurations, and it'll give you same benefits with better ergonomics.
- The article underexplores the third choice of the predator - enriching the environment. Or, perhaps, we should introduce a fourth choice[1]: meta-enrichment, or developing technology. That is, reconfiguring and extending your tooling to offer you more/different contextual cues (foraging), navigation tools (navigation) and operations (enrichment). This is where Emacs shines above all - for a proficient Emacs user, meta-enrichment is something one just does. Of course, as a developer living in Emacs, I suffer from confirmation bias[2] :).
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[0] - https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/coderibbon.html
[1] - Incidentally, one that distinguishes humans from the rest of life on Earth.
[2] - I mean, over the past year I spent about a week worth of time on developing what now is 1400 lines of Emacs Lisp[3] implementing some creature comforts, including a "control panel" for a particular flavor of development I'm doing. I could've avoided spending that week if I used VS Code instead, but then I'd also lose on all the benefits I get from a tool that fits like a glove.
[3] - That's 1400 lines of my own Elisp, on top of the ton of third-party elisp packages and customizations specific to them.