Terminal, grep, silversearcher-ag, cscope, tree, doxygen, all in union with iTerm geometry hotkeys well-tuned, Hammerspoon for window management, and copious amounts of real-estate for doc-reading, which is 60% of the effort.
Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
581–590 of 652 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you work without it, I would similarly suggest turning it in for a month. In the past when I've tried to use IDEs, I've often given up within minutes because they would keep doing things that disrupt my flow - like popping up an entire menu of autocomplete suggestions in a way that obscures other code I'm trying to read, or autotyping a close bracket that I would have typed anyway by muscle memory, or not making…
Autoclosing parens, brackets, braces -- one of the most annoying things to me, for example in tools like JupyterLab, but also in IDEs.
My editor inserts them and “smartly” overwrites them. If you type it yourself it will ignore it and move the cursor. You can hit delete and it will remove the added parenthesis, or you can keep typing and it will leave it there for you.
It’s been configurable as an option to have those in every editor I’ve used for about 15 years
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#583LSP = Language Server Protocol
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can definitely hit my Return key with more precision than I can drag a cursor over a 40x400px target but go off :P (I use a Superior Technologies trackball because it's the only mouse I could find manufactured in the USA and it's really not very precise, it's kind of a self handicap to nudge me towards keyboard shortcuts, muscle memory gains just have a steeper curve on keyboard than mouse)
You still need several key strokes to get there ;) So it's not as precise as an actual precision pointing device
Maybe this is a physical development thing? Because i can't imagine a world in which my mouse is more accurate than my keyboard. The mouse requires two-way responsive action. I have to both move the mouse and observe the movement with my eyes to update the movement as necessary.
With the keyboard there is no such coordination, I simply think the thing i want to happen and press the appropriate keys.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem weirdly angry that some other people like to work in a different way than you like to work. People like different things. You still get to like your thing.
There's nothing weird with being annoyed at people who not only have no idea about the tools available to them, but also make no effort to learn about them while patting themselves on the back for it and feeling superior
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Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
So one of my current projects has a part that is five coordinated microservices. Two of them need to use concurrency that modern tooling doesn’t love out of the box. The entire system has to have strict timing and low latency. Autocomplete can help with some pieces but this isn’t actually that much code. What it requires is being able to visualize the whole thing, be able to test exactly how the underlying libraries…
If you'll allow me to shill my company for a second, I'd be interested if you could take a look at DBOS[0] and tell me if it might simplify your problem. It's designed for making microservices a lot easier to reason about, and might help make your system a lot simpler. [0] https://docs.dbos.dev/why-dbos
That seems quite clever but for this specific use case it likely won’t solve the difficult bits. Namely I am using threads and subprocesses mixed with asyncio and PyAV to transcode real time video. Does DBOS allow you to store the internal state of Python modules written in C? How does it deal with recreating subprocesses and threads?
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#587This question reminds me of the first time I met a blind programmer. I asked him how he managed to code, and he replied with something that stayed with me: a good programmer should organize software in such a way that every piece of code has a clear and logical place. The organization should be so intuitive that anyone could build a mental model of the structure and navigate it easily, even without seeing it. It felt…
> Not only do I avoid using LSP features, but I’m also opposed to their use. While they can help with navigation, they may prevent developers from experiencing and addressing the underlying structural issues in their code. LSP by itself will not prevent anything. LSP (using the terminology from OP, but any IDE really) is just a tool like any other which allows you to do things faster. It doesn't matter how organized…
> When you have to manually search for files and then Ctrl+F to find functions, lookup docs in a web browser (which I hear is how people who don't use IDEs still do that), or manually run a linter/compiler to see warnings in your code, you're just being really inefficient. I can't understand that at all. Why don't you use automation to help your job when the whole point of your job is automation?
To each his own. I use the tools depending on the project. Meaning: most greenfield stuff (even at work) and my personal projects, I can handle with just Vim, a handful terminal tabs---where I grep, run linters (which send out OS notifications), and compile---and a web browser. The main dayjob codebase with all its 10+ years of legacy I wouldn't even dare look at without an IDE.
That said, I find the UX of IntelliSense + autocomplete to be extremely distracting (and don't get me started about Copilot). It's just a necessary evil because, distracted as I am with them, I am simply less productive in the dayjob codebase without it.
Hence, really, your Kung Fu is no better than mine, nor vice versa.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#588At work we use very niche languages that don't have language servers or really much support in IDEs in general (people have internally written syntax highlighters but that's about it). So I can't Ctrl+Click to jump to the definition or anything like that. Typically I use VSCode's directory find feature (or CLI tools like grep) to just search the codebase. This does mean weeding through results in comments and such, and makes it really annoying for non-unique variable names.
As for things like type hints, I end up switching between tabs or splitting the editor to view the definitions. Although that hasn't been a huge problem for me since the types of these languages aren't as robust as more mainstream languages.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#589Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#590This thread is certainly eye opening. It reminds me of a post I saw somewhere, maybe on Reddit, where someone was describing their experience working as an intern at an old-school tech shop. All of the developers there were hardcore Vim/Emacs users with 20+ years of experience. The intern was tasked with a large-scale refactoring of some modules which the senior devs estimated would take months of work to complete. A…
Sounds like those developers were just bad, regardless of the tools.
I expect that especially hardcore and purist Vim users (the likes that does not use any plugin or configuration) should know to use macros and other available tools (not even mentioning bash) to make the work faster.
With enough experience on those, you can get a level of productivity that is not much different than IDEs like IntelliJ.