Newsletter June 2026: Interface Design

Last month, I wrote about a minimalist approach to managing servers. In it, I concluded that the next step is to come up with a minimalist approach to monitoring servers. This month I think I came up with a solution for that.

It works by running a "monitoring report" script periodically on the server. It collects information and sends an email report to me. Right now it sends me an email daily that contains, among other things, a list of packages that can be upgraded. It looks something like this:

It also highlights packages that I find especially important to upgrade. When I have time, I can perform an "ospatch" to upgrade the packages.

This workflow is good because it has the feedback loop set up. Every day (which I might change to every week), I get a monitoring report that I can look at and determine if I need to take any actions. Furthermore, I can tweak the contents of the report to become more and more useful over time. This solution gives a lot of "bang for the buck" and fits nicely with the minimalist approach.

Then something happened that altered my trajectory of work and interest. One day when I was mindlessly scrolling my Mastodon feed, I came across the article Show your hands honor for the strange power they bring you.

The article is about interface design and has interactive examples that you can play with. (Why don't more articles work like this?) I especially liked the part about the Canon Cat which shows a different way of moving the cursor in a text-like editor. I got caught up in the subject and also started reading the book The Humane Interface (you can borrow it and read it there online for free) that was suggested by the article. The book is written by Jef Raskin who is also the creator of the Canon Cat.

One point that the book makes is that the concept of an operating system plus applications is flawed from an interface design perspective. It suggests a different way that have inspired me and taken rlworkbench in a new direction. I also watched a presentation by Jef's son Aza Raskin called Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop which also presents some of those ideas.

Jef's book has given me so many ideas that I want to experiment with. The first thing I started to work on was to remove the modal editing interface from rlworkbench. Since I'm a long time Vim user, I'm very accustomed to modal text editing, and modeled rlworkbench after that. But reading about how that is bad interface design and being shown how you could do different, I'm determined to try to build something fully modeless. I'm still skeptical that I can get the same efficiency and ergonomics as I have in Vim, but I'm excited to explore.

TODO

Here are the things that I'm currently most interested in working on next month:

• rlworkbench

  • Start using rlworkbench instead of Vim as my default text editor

  • Explore interface design principles from The Humane Interface

  • Deploy my profiler and repetition tester

  • Draw performance graph and replace current timings with rlprofiler

  • Think about how to use it to create a game dev environment for kids

• My blog

  • Migrate all blog posts to it

  • Fix redirects

    • For blog posts

    • For pages: rickardlindberg.me/projects/x -> projects.rickardlindberg.me/x

      • Same for tags?

  • Make different post types render nicely

    • Icons?

• Computer, Enhance!

  • Continue course and do more homework

• Store Kinesis keyboard config in dotfiles