I love this kinda thing! I love to skin my programs and make them look and behave the way I want. I was happy to see foobar in the video since that's one of my favorite programs for this.
Someone mentioned Haiku--I also love Haiku!
My dream UI brainstorm session:
I love to use keyboard shortcuts for most of my computer usage. Mouse is inefficient from my point of view. One big issue I have with the way we usually design keyboard shortcuts is that they require you to press multiple buttons at once, which a keyboard isnt designed to do, and also is often hard to do one-handed.
So my solution to this problem is key sequences. I remember playing an FPS game that had many voice commands bound to sequences on the numpad. This allowed the game to have dozens of options that were all accessible in 2 or at most 3 key strokes. Not only that but as you were playing you would learn the most used commands by heart VERY quickly. (I thought it was Return to Castle Wolvenstein that had this but I can't find any confirmation online.)
Perhaps this principle could be used in UI design as well?
ie. press numpad 0 to get a list of commands:
1 -> firefox (browser)
2 -> foobar (music player)
3 -> directory opus (file explorer)
4 -> photoshop (image editor)
5 -> all programs
6 -> settings
...
9 -> [current program context, for example 1-minimize, 2-maximize, 3-close]
by doing this, you can start to do super quick one-handed shortcuts. they could even be context/program-sensitive so for example:
0->2(music player)->3(next song)
or
9->3 (close)
alternatively each number could contain a number of programs, so:
1(browsers)->1 firefox, 2 vivaldi, 3 opera
2(music players)->1 foobar, 2 winamp, 3 xmplay
this could be configurable!
it's really fast to type those kinda codes in and they will become second nature. It could be accompanied by a visual as well that shows a list of items, perhaps it could be scrollable with page up/page down or arrow keys in case you don't know what number you want. You could even include a search option as well.
If I think about it, you could also do this with a numpad on the side of a mouse, if you didn't want to take your hand off the mouse.
I hope this makes sense...
... Does anything like this exist? I really want this now.