Who are the best UI/UX designers in the Linux community?

I might be showing my hand a bit much, at least as far as my function-over-frills leanings go, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_(software) was the first Linux program that really wowed me. Apt-get gives you everything from the lowest-level libraries to desktop programs, available without needing to hunt around with a web browser, with all updates and dependencies handled automagically; Synaptic gives you all that with an extremely usable GUI and a powerful search feature.

I think whoever was behind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redirection_%28computing%29 should get some sort of lifetime award for this. Pure, elegant, and nearly invisible.

On the subject of emacs: Keyboard macros are a real treat. They take experience because you have to know how to use emacs well. They records keyboard input and can replay it. You can start with a buffer of lines and do something to each of them. Since with emacs you usually do everything through the keyboard, anything you can do with emacs can be recorded to a macro. Sounds not that exciting right? There must be screencasts out there of this stuff. The kill buffer is great and so quick to use. Also marking regions is a lot better then the normal GUI shift-click-click dance, I hate anything that feels like a video game. Helm or IDO are great, as looking for things in menus or lists is a waste of time. Also, emacs has a back button like your browser, it's called the mark ring. One of the greatest things about vi is that it forces you to think before you do anything, this might not seem like a feature but watch someone codding, and see how much they scroll around looking for things. The process when using vi is "Step 1: What do I want to find? Step 2: How to I use vi to find it? Step 3: 4 key strokes(no exaggeration) then it is found." While more GUI oriented editors also have sophisticated find features the process I see way too much is "Step 1: look at things on screen to see if any resemble what I'm looking for Step 2: if yes move mouse+click, if no make something else come up on screen and goto step 1" There is a vast difference in the mental state fostered by UI that puts images in front of you to accept/reject or one that forces think/plan/act. After editors, shells are probably the other major UI that you might want to look into. You might be able to find interesting areas of exploration by looking at what features Zsh and Fish use for promotion. IPython is also interesting. Perl one-liners are quite the UX. No other language goes as far as perl to make this work. Sudo is an interesting solution. If it is any help, the designers we are talking about here are Kernighan, Ritchie, (for redirect etc) Stallman (for emacs) and Wall (for perl).

https://medium.com/@mkozlows/why-atom-cant-replace-vim-433852f4b4d1 (almost, but not quite, enough to make me switch from Emacs).

straw: Can I ask why you keep using emacs, then? This article seems to imply Vim does the big emacs thing nowadays, no? (I switch between emacs, Sublime Text, and Coda at work, and the author of that piece is right: extensibility is use, but those atomic little commands sounds super neat.)

rorgy, I've switched editors maybe 4 times (Beagle Brother's Line Editor, the various WordStar compatible editors of the early PC era (ie: TurboPascal, etc), Brief/CRiSP, and Emacs (because CRiSP's licensing per CPU was ridiculous for a diverse mixed environment, $500 a seat was fine, $500 for Windows, Linux, Irix and.... yeah, the boss wasn't biting). (Yeah, I've used VisualStudio and assorted word processors and whatever, but for my primary editing environment...) Basically, composability is awesome, and I love the theory and elegance of that design, but my fingers are trained and I'd rather put those neurons into something else that'll expand my thinking in new ways. Like new language concepts. But that brings me to: Have you read Larry Wall on linguistics and the design of Perl? Some interesting ideas there, even as I find myself veering away from Perl.

I think http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html for emacs is an amazing work of at-your-finger-tips usability, something that should be extended to the entire operating system (which isn't that hard to imagine if, like me, emacs is basically your operating system). https://www.midnight-commander.org/ is usually well regarded as a file manager. For the most part, though, it seems like linux developers tend to imitate already existing interfaces from Windows or OS X or even older. Classic X11 applications written in raw X11 or in something like Xaw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets, nor is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment (even if it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy by reminding me of my old SparcStation pizza box.) One area to look into might be stuff like http://xmonad.org/, which is really a rethink of the windowed user interface paradigm, completely removing the mouse from the equation. I like it. Is it great design? I dunno.

As far as rockstar UI designers, maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carsten_Haitzler? But whether or not http://www.enlightenment.org should be considered great or really terrible design is a question for the flame wars to ponder.

I'd like to nominate a few Linux utilities: https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim for vim. I work in an extremely large codebase, and being able to fuzzy search for a file means that I can find a file in seconds. http://powerline.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation/linux.html. I haven't used it, but my friends rave about it.