While I enjoyed 4dwm when I had a sgi, I am not convinced the desktop environment was that great, it did however have a very nice file manager, which I guess is 90% of a desktop environment, so perhaps it was pretty good after all.

The best sgi ui innovation, which unfortunately I rarely see anywhere else, was the use of drop pockets, these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.

I was unable to find a good example with multiple pockets, but for example: when you see that blue square in the file manager, you know you can drop something there and it will try to use it as a path.

https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/user-experience-ux/pa...

Vaguely related, I saw an extremely nice little bit of UI on a MRI machine console the other day. When planning a sequence of scans, you drag them into a listbox. But once that listbox is "full" from top to bottom, it's hard to append to the end (rather than inserting between two existing scans), because you keep having to hit that tiny 1px wide target between the bottom of the box and the last entry.

So someone at Bruker noticed this, and made a drop target UNDER the listbox that's labeled Drop Here to Append. It makes things SO much more pleasant.

Best screenshot I could find online: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Horea-Christian/publica...

This reminds me of the drag and drop system in Risc OS, in that it's a little unusual:

https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/#files.operations

these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.

Something similar exists in macOS, but isn't widely used, as far as I can tell.

You can create a script in Automator that does things with an input file, and then save it as a desktop icon that you can drop things onto. I have a few of these for auto-resizing images.

(Bonus: Because it's done in Automator, you can also have the same script appear under Quick Actions when you Option-click the file/s.)

Panic's Transmit allows you to create a desktop icon that sends whatever's dropped on it to a server via FTP, SFTP, S3, Google Drive, or a dozen other methods.

Had great scrollbars. When dragged there would be a shadow to show where the bar was. So you could go back if needed. Also the first platform I noticed that you could middle click the scrollbar to move directly, or control click the titlebar to lower. Though those conventions may have been from Motif?

It listed wm hot keys on the window menu and had vector icons. Yes, believe it was the best desktop of the era.

Would like to see an improved version of it, not merely a faithful reproduction. I hesitate to say modern because it often means dumbed-down. But made for higher resolution would be great.