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The RISC OS GUI

(telcontar.net)
75 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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fidotron ◴[] No.44023455[source]
> When a program needs to allow the user to choose a file, drag and drop is again used, with the window providing a drop area to collect the file

The neat part was you could "save" from one app into another, without having decided to actually save the file yourself yet at all.

I have to echo the comments about the mouse button "Adjust". Being able to move windows about while they preserve depth position without some obscure shortcut was very useful.

Over the years I've grown to appreciate the extent to which whatever vision there may have been behind RISC OS originally the lack of a proper GUI toolkit and serious OS internals held them back such that by Win95 Windows really was better. At exhibitions in 94/95 Acorn devs themselves were conspicuously more interested in running NetBSD than RISC OS, and it always seemed a shame they didn't make a more serious effort to get some descendant of the RISC OS desktop ported over to a UNIX like kernel, rather like a more serious shot at the ROX desktop, but in truth Win95 won the late 90s desktop paradigm war convincingly.

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sillywalk ◴[] No.44023909[source]
> serious OS internals

There is a "moonshot" effort to redo the internals of RiscOS from RiscOS assembly.

https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2025/03/28/moonshot...

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/documents/risc-os-moonsho...

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1. fidotron ◴[] No.44023958[source]
Yeah, I'd seen this. I've not been a participant in the RISC OS community since the 90s, and clearly do not share the same enthusiasm some have for aspects of it.

I'm honestly of the view the wisest thing to do would be focus on making it play well with being emulated, right down to enabling enhancements when doing so (such as graphics acceleration), but then not being in that world it really is not my call at all.