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by vidarh 9 days ago
I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.

My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).

My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.

My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.

I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.

I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.

I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.

(Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535694/the-future-was-here/

2 comments

> I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.

Me too. I wrote a blog post about it: https://text.tchncs.de/r3nun0mxs9

I love this so much. Did you ever take it further? Did you find anything close to ARexx?
Love it! Any chance you'd be willing to share what you've got on GH? Also, I wonder if anyone has tried creating an Amiga OS style Linux distro? Sounds like your work could be the guts of it.