Jef Raskin’s cul-de-sac and the quest for the humane computer

To crystallize these concepts, rather than create another new computer, Raskin instead started work on a software package with a team that included his son, Aza, initially called The Humane Environment. THE’s HumaneEditorProject was first unveiled to the world on Christmas Eve 2002, though initially only as a SourceForge CVS tree, since it was considered very unfinished. The original early builds of the Humane Editor were open-source and intended to run on classic Mac OS 9, though QEMU, SheepShaver and Classic under Tiger and earlier will also run it.

As before, the Humane Editor uses a large central workspace subdivided into individual documents, here separated by backtick characters. Our familiar two-tone cursor is also maintained. However, although font sizes, boldface, italic, and underlining were supported, colors (and, additionally, font sizes) were still selected by traditional Mac pulldown menus.

Leaping, here with a trademark, is again front and center in THE. However, instead of dedicated keys, leaping is merely a part of THE’s internal command line, termed the Humane Quasimode, where other commands can be sent. Notice that the prompt is displayed as translucent text over the work area.

When text was deleted, either by backspacing over it or pressing DELETE with a selected region, it went to an automatically created and maintained “DELETION DOCUMENT” from which it could be rescued. Effectively, this turned the workspace into a yank buffer along with all your documents, and undoing any destructive editing operation thus became merely another cut and paste. (Deleting from the deletion document just deleted.)

A full list of commands accepted by the Quasimode was available by typing COMMANDS, which in turn emitted them to the document. These are based on precompiled Python files, which the user could edit or add to, and arbitrary Python expressions and code could also be inserted and run from the document workspace directly.