Just jotting down some quick thoughts before bed.

Imagine a control panel for your server that had each service/website/whatever represented as a little unit in a rack that you could virtually pull out and edit configs of. Or you could pull it out and put it on a shelf to the side to deactivate it or something. I guess pulling it out to edit a config wouldn't be quite right because it would still be running. Maybe it could leave behind a ghost or something in there to show the old version (before any edits you make) is still running. Or the camera could move, the surroundings fade away and you're just focusing on that one rack.

I've been thinking more about literate programs lately. Basically it's like if you wrote a "book" (long markdown (or other language) document) that was your program. The prose is in focus, introducing bits of code that can be "tangled" together to produce a compilable program. I want to have a solution like this for my system config (and maybe server too), so i can explain everything and have it all in one place instead of scattered between lots of files. But that's a story for another day. I'm thinking about what if you had an interface that looked like an actual book, and you could turn the pages and maybe edit inline as well, so you could really feel like you're reading a book when looking through your system config (or any other literate program or maybe non-literate program too). That'd be pretty cool. And maybe if this applied to your server config, the server rack idea from last paragraph could just be another representation of that same source book. Each service corresponds to a chapter in the book, but a unit in the rack, or something like that.

Another thing i've thought about before is what if your code editor looked like a physical textbook, maybe with lines. Generally i think it would be cool if computers looked more like stuff from real life. Skeuomorphism. They were onto something in the 90s and 00s. I think DAWs are maybe still like this but idk of much else. (Sometimes i wish paragraphs were trees because now i want to pick up a thread from a few sentences ago.) I've been wanting to try writing code in a textbook just to get the vibe and see how i feel about it. Maybe i'll try that someday soon.

Good night :3