Daniel K Lyons

I don't have time at the moment to read the other comments, but I will mention a couple things. Apologies if they've already been brought up! Part of what makes Windows (and the other commercial OSes) GUI shell experiences so bad is a philosophy: that there is a distinction between the system author and the system user. The Xerox PARC Smalltalk system that originated a lot of the still-modern ideas about the UI did not make this distinction: everything was editable by the user, in realtime, constantly. If you didn't like the menus, the buttons, the layout of the program, all of it was up for grabs by you. You can experience this today in Squeak or Pharo, but of course, this is niche technology. Another forgotten mouse concept from Plan 9 is mouse chords. If you click button 1 and then add button 2, that creates a 1-2 chord; there is also a 1-3 chord. I believe on Plan 9 you can do cut/copy/paste just with the mouse using these chords. Plan 9 in general has a lot of weird and interesting ideas about computing, but this seems like the only one that would resonate with Ross, based on the video. This actually reminds me of chord keyboards. Even back in 1968 in Doug Englebart's famous "mother of all demos," he's using one of these. Most of these, unlike the keyboards we use for text entry, there usually are not too many other ways to put your hands on the device, so there shouldn't be as much "n"/"m" confusion.