(A bit random for my first post, but I couldn’t resist jumping into this thread…)
Maybe we will eventually co-evolve with computer code, and actually function optimally as a symbiotic system and feel great, but it seems that for now, the accepted wisdom is that humans have a certain psychological makeup which requires a bit of friction and effort in any achievements in order to have a truly satisfying sense of self.
Or maybe it’s not the friction and effort, but the fact that we have an over-large visual cortex (insert some citations about how much percentage of neurons are related to visual processing, or about how the neuronal activity of imagining is indistinguishable from actually seeing something). Thus, we need to have some kind of visual/spatial map of knowledge, otherwise we can’t really grasp it. So I suspect Picard still has some kind of graphical file manager metaphor on his tablet. Three centuries isn’t enough time for evolution to replace spatial cognition with some alternative (some kind of electromagnetic sensing of where on a storage medium a particular file is??)
Back to email…
Back on the original topic, I’m working on setting up notmuch (command-line email indexing) as part of my new JD system. It’s a full-text indexing and tagging system for mail, so constructing your own ‘views’ of your email is a first-class behaviour. So first-class, in fact, that you kinda have to make your own inbox if you want it by creating up a rule to tag newly indexed email with the tag ‘inbox’. By extension, you can dispense with the classic inbox entirely and move stuff straight to your working folders (which are just tags). So I think it is perfectly suited for the approach outlined in the video. I’ll report back when I’ve got it set up …
About GUI’s and CLI’s …
Referencing my comments about visual thinking, I’m a command-line geek but mainly out of ideological necessity. I have come to believe that GUI’s are better interfaces because we humans are visual thinkers (all of us, not just the so-called right-brain visual thinkers – for us, even more so). I use programs like notmuch because I care about privacy and freedom and using hardware as long as possible, and because their features aren’t going to go away because of corporations chasing revenue or buzzwords, and because developing CLI apps is faster and easier than GUI apps. But if there were graphical applications that didn’t violate those other important principles, I would certainly prefer them.