Anders Magnusson hosts screenshots of developers' and Unix people's desktops from 2002, plus an interview with Dennis Ritchie.
HN links his screenshot collection in threads about desktop setups, window layouts, fonts, and tools like acme, including Dennis Ritchie's desktop.
I'm curious - have you ever used a text/curses based email client ? It's amazingly fast and you can forget all about browser security since you do it over SSH. It's an extremely efficient workflow (albeit with some hacks required to get modern functionality).
I switched to pine in ... 1993 ? I've never used anything else (except for brief stints of corporate email account and consulting, many years ago).
You'll note that in the "screenshots from famous developers"[1] that Brian Kernighan (Unix legend, the K in K&R and AWK) is using alpine in his 2015 screenshot...
[1] https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developers--2002-vs.-2015/
If you look at old screenshots of how people used desktop computers [1], it was rare to see fullscreen windows, even on the tiny monitors of the day, and when most people used only a single monitor.
Today, we all have gigantic monitors, many have more than one, but for whatever reason people want to maximize or tile windows. Maybe it's the influence of the fullscreen only, unitasking paradigm from phones and tablet computers, but it just doesn't make much sense to me on a desktop computer.
1: https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_b_moolenaar.png
https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/
Hey this one over here [1] has a virtual desktop minimap on the top right. That person mentions fvwm which has this [2] website with screenshots, but I don't see the minimap there. Could someone help me find a reference to it?
Update: Also on the bottom left here [3]
[1] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_warren_toomey.gif
[2] https://www.fvwm.org/
[3] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_jordan_hubbard.jpg
I just saw that Dennis Ritchie has a short cut to Sam on his Windows NT desktop in 2002, while Brian Kernighan was using Sam from plan9port on Mac OS in 2015, from this screenshot https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developers--2002-vs.-2015/
I thought it was interesting to point this out.
I think monospaced fonts are still popular in the plan9/golang crowd using the acme text editor. googling "dennis ritchie acme" leads to this : https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/ is that it ?
Dennis Ritchie running Rob Pike's acme editor on Windows back in July 2002.
https://anders.unix.se/images/dmr_screenshot.gif
https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/