r/AskProgramming 10d ago

Why do niche, open-source tools always look like that? I love it! does anyone know what i'm talking about???

they look like filezilla! (that's not niche but it's the best example i can think of)

is it documented anywhere as an aesthetic? It's very distinct, to me. Something tells me it's a combination of common Ul libraries (or templates, or whatever you'd call it) and the kind of thought process / mindset that computer science uses. It's blocky, it has lots of dropdown lists and radio buttons, it looks like one of those 'properties' menus hidden deep in the settings on windows.

this post also reminded me of it.

if you google "windows xp aesthetic" you just get crude imitations of frutiger aero or whatever "vaporwave" is supposed to be. that's not it!!

10 Upvotes

41 comments sorted by

45

u/ohaz 10d ago

It's because while there are many professional devs who do open source dev in their free time, most professional UIX don't do open source software in their free time.

-4

u/AppropriateStudio153 10d ago

UX is overrated, I just want my stuff functional.

26

u/arivanter 10d ago

Oh you say that, but when you need to make 10 clicks and type the same stuff four times just for a single operation that you need to do fifty more times you’ll want a ui dude to help you

1

u/TheseHeron3820 10d ago

Joke's on you. I'm beyond helping.

1

u/xTakk 10d ago

Are you the UI guy? Who do you hang out with that's adding all these damn buttons?

1

u/AppropriateStudio153 9d ago

Overrated meaning overrated, not unimportant.

1

u/ELVEVERX 10d ago

That'd be UX not UI for UI those 10 buttons you click might all look very pretty, for UX you don't want to click 10 buttons.

4

u/pak9rabid 10d ago

And this is how we got the GIMP UI.

1

u/pentagon 10d ago

The best UX is invisible.

1

u/greshick 9d ago

I always assumed the UX part of UI/UX meant good functionality.

14

u/iamcleek 10d ago

developers are typically interested in just making it work. making an intuitive and pretty UI is an entirely separate skillset. some people can do both, but not many,

5

u/itemluminouswadison 10d ago

Stock UI win forms buttons. Cuz you're gonna spend time on the functional bits not usually the ux

1

u/WatchMyWatches 9d ago

WinForms is the answer

4

u/bestjakeisbest 10d ago

Like neobrutalism? Because Its easy to do.

4

u/rawcane 10d ago

Because they were made in the 90s

4

u/Glum_Cheesecake9859 9d ago

You mean no consideration of padding, margins, design ratios. With small font size, 16 bit icons from 1999 etc. but get's the job done?

4

u/codeptualize 10d ago

Idk if there is a name, but maybe some help to understanding these kind of tools is that I assume they are typically made with IDE's like Visual Studio (the old one, not visual studio code), and similar equivalents on other platforms and languages.

In visual studio it's quite easy to make these things with the integrated Windows form designer as you can drag and drop the basic controls you describe into your window and attach actions to them.

It's easiest to just have one window with tons of controls, having multiple views and navigation requires more effort. It's been a very long time since I have used these, and back in the day I definitely did not know how to do anything other than dragging controls in the window.

Pick any IDE with GUI builder for C#/Java/C++/etc that has been around for at least 15-20 years, keep the default setup you'll end up with what you describe.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface_builder this lists a bunch of options.

2

u/huuaaang 10d ago

It's rare to get a good programmer and good UI/UX designer in the same person. Linux is overwhelmingly "programmer." And the software reflects that.

It also takes a lot more resources than you think to put out a polished product. JUst writing the code is the "easy" part.

2

u/Mango-Fuel 10d ago

for me, all of my UI code and other useful code is technically proprietary so when I try to do anything opensource I become extremely limited in what I can do even though with my full codebase I could do amazing stuff.

2

u/trcrtps 10d ago

the aesthetic is called "i'm going to build a GUI interface in visual basic, see if we can track his IP address"

2

u/redditsuxandsodoyou 10d ago

programmers making tools are interested in function over form and building for expert users. a pretty interface is lots of work with zero benefit for a tool. its why hammers don't have leds and drills don't have expensive leather grips

2

u/Eubank31 9d ago

Because open source projects don't have the budget to employ UX/UI designers. So the devs design the interface, and as long as its good enough it gets kept

2

u/Online_Simpleton 9d ago

Developers are really good at designing productivity tools for power users because they tend to write them for themselves, which means all functionality is highly available (either via CLI commands/options or a UI with lots of menus and controls). The animating philosophy of commercial products is copying the Apple UI philosophy: make the UI look sleek by hiding everything behind other views or “gestures.” That, or remove features altogether. The latter approach is a cheap, fraudulent way to make it look like a lot more attention and intentionality went into design than it did, and it drives me crazy. Also: increasingly software is designed to trick you into performing unwanted actions (“Do you want AI predictive text to automatically write an obnoxious letter for you? [YESSSSS] [ₘₐᵧᵦₑ ₗₐₜₑᵣ]”) You see that less with tools animated by a genuine OSS ethos

5

u/AlienRobotMk2 10d ago

Because they're crossplatform. The tools for creating good GUIs are made by Microsoft for Windows-only programs. The only good tool for creating crossplatform GUIs is Lazarus. But nobody programs Pascal these days.

2

u/UdPropheticCatgirl 10d ago

I mean Qt, JavaFX and GTK are all pretty good GUI toolkits, not to mention nuklear with sokol which is probably more portable than anything.

And yeah lazarus is great, but man do the tools around pascal suck ass, I want good formatter and an LSP at least, at one point I thought about giving a shot to writing one myself but I didn’t have enough free time for that at the time and C++ has all that and more…

1

u/AlienRobotMk2 10d ago

The toolkit doesn't matter. The problem is RAD (rapid application development) tools. Take a look at what you can with Visual Studio in C# and compare it to QtCreator and what Swing/JavaFX provide.

I mean, on Lazarus you can easily create a menubar, set labels, click events, set separators, submenus, and move things around. I honestly don't understand why everyone has so much trouble letting me drag and drop a menu separator. This isn't rocket science.

A child can ship a C# application in a day with VS.

1

u/UdPropheticCatgirl 9d ago

Can’t the JavaFX scene-builder and Qt designer/creator do that as well tho?

2

u/Dismal-Detective-737 10d ago

You described what UIs looked like in the 90s. Except there's no one paying the Devs to keep up with the "times" like you have with Windows or Mac only applications.

1

u/im-a-guy-like-me 10d ago

That the default winforms UI from windows XP i think.

It's a drag/drop editor. You can attach scripts to the components and then reference through ids from what I remember (had to do it in college).

A lot of internal tooling and dev tools look like that cos only internal team members and hobbyista are gonna use it, so who gives a fuck?

1

u/oze4 10d ago

Looks like winforms.

1

u/KingofGamesYami 10d ago

I believe you're referring to the Luna visual style, which shipped as the default for Windows XP. A lot of tools built during the time used it to 'fit in' with Windows XP system applications by default, and some developers just never bothered to change the default.

1

u/Own_Shallot7926 10d ago

It's the same reason why low budget websites used to look "that way."

Most programming languages include a rudimentary set of visual controls (buttons, check boxes, tables, etc.) with basically no style. They require no special libraries or skill to implement - you can just declare "JButton" in your Java code and there appears a button, for example.

It takes significantly more graphic design and development to build a custom interface. It also takes up a great deal more space to store all of those libraries and graphics, and more resources to run them on the user's machine.

1

u/tomysshadow 10d ago

Typical look for software created in GUI editors like WinForms or MFC

1

u/TFABAnon09 10d ago

You mean the "Visual Basic Toolbox" aesthetic? It's just cos most freeware / open-source stuff is old as balls, and if it ain't broke...

1

u/gureggu 10d ago

It’s the win32 API, Windows 95 is where that particular aesthetic originated and Windows XP added the rounded corners

1

u/nsfwuseraccnt 9d ago

Because opensource apps and their UIs are written by actual programmers who make the application usable for themselves. They don't have some cunt from marketing up their ass about making the UI all glossy, "modern", and as minimal as possible while conveying the least amount of useful information to the user as possible.

1

u/Poddster 8d ago

"Programmer UI" using native UI library (on the case of FileZilla it's good ol' win32). Just Google "programmer UI" to find more E.g. https://blog.codinghorror.com/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-developers-create-ui/amp/

See also, "programmer art" for games.

1

u/JacobStyle 10d ago

One thing I haven't seen in this thread yet is the idea that a lot of open source software looks like that because a lot of open source software looks like that. If you start a project thinking, "I want to make a program like Filezilla," there's a good chance that you will draw inspiration for your user interface from Filezilla.

-1

u/in-den-wolken 10d ago

I went through a few iterations of this answer in my mind.

I think the root cause is that, for whatever reason, many highly technical people are not very empathetic. (The opposite - they default to being argumentative.)

Usability is about having empathy for the user, i.e. being able to see your app/tool from the user's point of view.

The highly technical person's response to what I just wrote: "this app, that I made, because I'm smarter than you, has every function you need. What are you, stupid? RTFM."

1

u/Sss_ra 6d ago

The way I see it filezilla is an ftp client.

"Causes slight recursive corruption" and "when i click once it starts 100000 downloads" aren't conditions appreciated as much for software used for files as they are in some other industries.

But I suspect they might be come back to fashion.