Mhwaveedit Alternatives

mhwaveedit reviews and mentions

• Dillo web browser homepage is for sale
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Aug 2022

  Re: domains -- good point.

  I found some screenshots of Dillo 0.6 -- interesting to see how little the GUI has changed over time, since 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020611213502/http://dillo.cips...

  I'm not a software engineer, just an unix-minded end-user, but I've always seen this sort of consistency as very good, thoughtful engineering. Having an almost unchanged GUI for 20+ years is an indicator of well thought out defaults early on, I suppose.

  Similar projects that come to mind are mhwaveedit and mtPaint (the latter was inspired by the former, /1, 2). I need to do audio work, so mhwaveedit is a gem that, for me, has replaced Audacity almost entirely. Blazing fast, with a consistent, extremely well thought out GUI again.

  Eric S. Raymond used Audacity as an example of great unix-y GUI design in "The Art of Unix Programming". I've often thought, that, by now, Audacity somewhat suffers from "feature creep", including GUI-wise. mhwaveedit has managed to escape adding features.

  Quoting a passage grom TAOUP: "Several features of this UI are subtly excellent and worthy of emulation /.../. But these are details. The central virtue of this program is that it has a superbly transparent and natural user interface, one that erects as few barriers between the user and the sound file as possible." /3

  I'd say Dillo managed to maintain the same core idea in terms of web browsing, have as few barriers between the user and the HTML file as possible. No added bloat, for 22 consecutive years. This is quite remarkable, actually -- as compared to GUI (and other) changes of many other browsers. Obviously, the scope of those "other browser projects" is different as well; it's a different world.

  Also, possibly the consistency of the GUI has to do with the use of FLTK, which kind of forces the devs to focus on the bare essentials.

  Let's hope that these indications of Dillo's death (because no homepage) are greatly exaggerated. Greetings and a thousand thanks thus far to all of Dillo's devs!

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint

  2. https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit

  3. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch06s01.html#au...

• I’m now in charge of Audacity. Seriously.[video]
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Apr 2021

  I've always found the Audacity UX to be cumbersome. I hope they make some big changes. I'm not super optimistic, though.

  If your needs are simple, I find mhwaveedit[0] much more pleasant to use than Audacity. It also ships with a ton of high quality filters. Really nice piece of software.

  0: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit