xkeeper

welcome to my personal hell

dragon warrior iii for the game boy color describes me as "stubborn", and i'm tempted to agree with that assessment


co-owner tcrf.net. i run an old forum, jul.
i've been around the internet since '01.
i generally feel like the internet
peaked somewhere around '07.


private: @xkeeper-PLUS
18+: @xkeeper-TI


plural / some kind of digital therian thing.
still discovering myself.
all of this is new to me.


discord / telegram
@xkeeper
signal
Xkeeper.99

HordeMommy
@HordeMommy asked:

What's a piece of software that you feel like is better designed than it has a right to be? In a world of bloated MVPs is there still something that makes you feel like computers are magic that you have an excuse to use (semi-)regularly?

most old software, honestly.

there's a reason for this, i suspect. before always-on internet was a thing, you had to actually make a program people would want to download, and one that wouldn't — couldn't — phone home and update constantly. it had to be actually feature-complete, or close.

ms paint, xp-era, has a host of keyboard shortcuts and simple features. for line or pixel art, it's impeccable. it does exactly what you need, it's worked fine for years. the old windows calculator, before the modern ones, similarly. old simple tools like metapad (notepad replacement) worked great.

when the era of auto-updating software started, a lot of that ended. just shove out garbage and patch it up later. let users be your beta testers. ship a bunch of weird changes and incomprehensible a/b tests to constantly "redo" things so that long-time users get confused and nobody knows how shit works any more.

it's hard for me to pick out particular ones because it feels like there were separate eras of software development for that reason.

(on some level, it was also about resources; 10 years ago, you couldn't count on people running 50 instances of a bloated web browser just to do basic shit like run a calculator.)

but yeah. the 95-to-XP version of MS Paint probably fits that. it's smooth, it's easy, it works, for a basic "draw shit and paint pixels" program it is miles ahead of even the newer ones.


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in reply to @xkeeper's post:

i've primarily moved to vscode these days for various reasons but i can't help but notice i still install notepad++ everywhere because sometimes you get a 4GB log file you gotta dig through and vscode fucking freezes and notepad++ just laughs

n++ is another great example, though one i haven't really used or installed in a long time. part of that's just because if i need huge files i'd rather do grep into less