{"id":102592,"date":"2026-08-27T01:00:02","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T05:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=102592"},"modified":"2026-08-26T10:51:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T14:51:56","slug":"qotd-useless-and-irritating-computer-tricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-useless-and-irritating-computer-tricks\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Useless and irritating computer tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I got reminded today that one of the things I truly hate in desktop environments is: animations.<\/p>\n

Stop trying to grab my attention, dammit!<\/p>\n

No, I do not want windows to fade in and out, or riffle like a deck of cards, distort into a crescent while they get sucked into the dock, or whatever other cute effect some UX designer thought up this week. Just no.<\/p>\n

I’m sitting at my machine to work on something. I’m concentrating. I’m a human with a Mark I meat-brain, so my flow state is fragile. When I tell my interface to do a state change, I want it to go fast and clean, not razzle-dazzle at me in a way that risks breaking my concentration.<\/p>\n

Actionable advice for people designing desktop environments: I get it about the eye candy, it’s marketing. All I’m saying is, have a freaking OFF switch? Give me a way to shut all that distracting shit right down.<\/p>\n

Cosmic Desktop, which I’ve truly loved ever since I started using the alpha, doesn’t have animations. The roadmap mutters about adding them in a future release. I’m going to be very sad if they are mandatory.<\/p>\n

To sharpen the point about distraction, let me talk about a fancy new-school desktop-environment hack that I do like; the ability to set a translucency level on terminal windows and docks and things.<\/p>\n

I tried setting translucency on my terminal background. At first, it looked pretty over the deep-sky astronomical photograph that Cosmic uses as a default background (and which matches my taste — I’ve been using a collection of similar deep sky photographs as backgrounds for many years). But it got old after about five minutes; when I’m reading text, and my eyes trip over a detail in the background, that’s distracting.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I really like being able to set translucency on my application dock. I can mouse up and pop up the dock to select an application without losing visual continuity with whatever is going on under the translucency. That is anti-distractive.<\/p>\n

I want my whole environment to be anti-distractive. Pretty is nice when I have the bandwidth to notice it on my own (yes, Cosmic I do like your default dark mode with neon-blue piping), but the moment an interface design tugs on my sleeve to say “look how cool I am!”, that’s when I reach for my revolver. <\/p>\n

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter<\/em><\/a>, 2026-05-19.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got reminded today that one of the things I truly hate in desktop environments is: animations. Stop trying to grab my attention, dammit! No, I do not want windows to fade in and out, or riffle like a deck of cards, distort into a crescent while they get sucked into the dock, or whatever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[28,41,15],"tags":[109,1235,428],"class_list":["post-102592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-esr","tag-marketing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qGI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102592"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104428,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102592\/revisions\/104428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}