Gizmodic Design

The beautiful world of Gizmodic Software design

What is Gizmodic Design?

Gizmodic Design describes any software that:

is written with scope intentionally heavily limited to the core purpose
limits mandatory external dependencies to the absolute minimum
follows at least the following guidelines adjacent to the UNIX philosophy:

Make each program achieve one core purpose, and do that well.
Programs should work together as a net of smaller projects, as opposed to a monolith.

is extensible (every part that could realistically be accessible from within a scripting API should be)
and does not depend on domain-specific/novel languages, instead opting for battle-tested languages like Lua or Shellscript or a simple IPC protocol instead

Note: The core purpose can be expanded upon by gizmos, the core should be minimal, the gizmos can make the program feature-rich.

In general, if you can write gizmos (any extensions, plugins, modules, ...) and it seems fairly minimal, you can expect the program to likely be considered gizmodic. If a program is very monolithic or heavyweight, it is nearly guaranteed to be antigizmodic.

What are some gizmodic programs?

There is a lot of gizmodic software out there. Great examples include:

Emacs
NeoVim
AwesomeWM
MPV
OpenRC
ConnMan
i3
tmux
ZSH