The Humane Environment
- 2026-01-25
- 별칭: Archy, THE
Jef Raskin이 The humane interface에서 주장한 새로운 개념의 소프트웨어 환경.
Core Principles
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Archy’s design philosophy can be distilled into a few simple ideas. For the scientific rationale behind these principles, see Jef Raskin’s book, The Humane Interface.
Your data is sacred
Problem: In a March 31, 2005, article titled “Drop the Mouse and Step Away From the PC,” MSNBC technology correspondent Bob Sullivan discusses “computer rage,” the anger provoked by data-destroying computers. In one case, a restaurant manager was so upset when his laptop crashed that he threw it into a deep fryer. You may not have gone to such extremes, but you might be among the 13 percent who have yelled at their computers, or the 7 percent who have hit them.
Computer rage is a familiar phenomenon because computers are so adept at losing your data. At any given moment, you are one innocent step away from destroying minutes, hours, days, months, or years of work. For example, what if you try to use the Save command (Control-S), but hit Select All (Control-A) instead, because the “A” key is next to the “S” key, and then you start typing, causing all of your work disappear? And what if you do something next that prevents you from recovering the erased text? You might feel like reaching for the deep fat fryer, too.
Solution: Archy never loses your work. This shouldn’t be a groundbreaking innovation in computer design, but it is. You never have to save because it’s done for you automatically. Your data is stored in such a way that if your computer crashes, your information will still be there the next time you start Archy up.
You don’t have to worry if you make a mistake. The UNDO command can reverse your steps all the way back to the first thing you ever did on Archy. Quitting Archy has no effect on UNDO’s elephantine memory.
Your train of thought is sacred
Problem: A computer has many ways to disrupt your concentration. For example…
- You’re writing an email to a friend about your vacation in Tahiti, when you notice that there is a defect in one of the photos you want to attach. You’d like to be able to correct it right there, right then, without having to switch to another application, but that’s impossible.
- You need to calculate the product of two numbers while you’re typing a document, but you don’t want to have to launch a calculator program in order to do so.
- You’re working on something on your computer when you run into a dialog box asking if you’re sure you want to do it, or warning that doing what you’re about to do may cause irretrievable loss of your data. You can’t get on with your work until you respond to the dialog box.
- You want to perform a task, but you hesitate because there are multiple ways to do it, for example, a menu accessed with the mouse or a key-command.
- You do something you’re used to doing, but something unexpected results. For example, when you’ve switched applications and “Control-M” no longer means what it did before, or when you’ve pressed the Caps Lock key and don’t notice it, or when you’ve accidentally pressed the Del key and everything you type overwrites your existing text.
Solution: Archy counters these problems by eliminating modes, which can be a significant source of confusion and error, and streamlining the decision process through “monotony,” that is, giving you only one way to accomplish a task. Modelessness and monotony encourage the formation of useful habits that enable you to work faster and more confidently. When such habits are fully formed, you can perform those tasks without conscious thought, and thus not be distracted from your content and your intentions. This is called achieving automaticity. (For more about “modelessness” and “monotony” see The Humane Interface, pgs. 37-59 and 66-68.)
Mode: A human-machine interface is modal with respect to a given gesture when (1) the current state of the interface is not the user’s locus of attention AND (2) the interface will execute one among several different possible responses to the gesture, depending on the system’s current state. (Mode)
Content and commands are primal
Problem: As far as you - the user of the computer - are concerned, only two things matter: your content, and what you want to do with it. Anything else just gets in your way. But today’s systems are loaded with things that have nothing to do with actually creating and modifying your content, such as the desktop, applications, files, and folders. Learning to manipulate this extra junk, which you didn’t create, takes time and energy, and distracts you from your work.
Solution: Archy consists solely of content and commands — no desktop, no applications, no files, and no folders. However, this simplification does not mean a reduction in functionality. The next two documents under the heading “About Archy” (in the navigation column to your left) explain how Archy can encompass any task while maintaining its simplicity.
You should not do more work than necessary
Problem: In less humane systems, you must learn hundreds of commands just to manage your operating system. Every application has a different set of commands and a new set of modes that have to be learned. Frustration and error are the inevitable result.
Solution: Archy eliminates the need for a user visible operating system and instead allows any operation to be performed right where you are, without having to go into a different mode or application.
Archy uses a small set of fundamental operations that let you easily accomplish a wide range of tasks. Archy makes speed trade-offs so that tasks users usually do often are convenient and quick, while seldom-done tasks may be a little less convenitent.
One such frequent task is cursor movement, something you do hundreds of times in a typical work day. In a recent interview with Ubiquity, Aza Raskin pointed out that an on-screen cursor move using the mouse, starting with hands on the keyboard, averages 3.5 seconds with current systems. In Archy, the same task averages 1.5 seconds. The reason for this sharp increase in speed is Leap™, Archy’s unique cursor movement mechanism, which lets you move the cursor while your hands remain on the keyboard. Leaping also works well for off-screen moves, where the savings are even greater.
These savings add up. Using a GUI, if you make a hundred cursor moves in an hour using the mouse, it will take almost six minutes, or roughly 10% of your work time. In Archy, it will take 2.5 minutes, or roughly 4% of your time. Over the months and years, you save many hours.
Leap™ allows you to find things easily, anywhere in your computer, and eliminates the need for a mouse (except for graphical input) or a scroll bar. Pulling the plug on the mouse also reduces a big source of repetitive stress injuries (RSI).
Aza concludes, “Once people sit down and use our system, they never want to leave, because Leap™ is addictive.”