Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker • Hacker News Board

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#11

Post by cmiles74 » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

sheraz wrote: post #5

I think the author echos some things I've been feeling about my work environment (the desktop). There is a lot of friction that comes when each of my applications wants to be its own immersive experience. My take-away from his post is that he seems to be iterating away from those rich, colorful, and distracting interfaces to something that is kind of interface-less. This, too, is my dream (or sorts). - Spotify withou…

I think I'd go a little further, even: not only is there friction moving from one "immersive" application to another, there seems to be some expenditure of energy necessary to actually make the switch. Each fights in it's own way, not only to deliver on it's function but to somehow tempt you into spending ever more time with that particular application.

A console or text-based interface seems like a big equalizer; for sure it's often easier to manage a console application but it puts hard limits on how much attention these applications may siphon away. Perhaps it's easier for my attention to wander than others, but when the task at hand is particularly boring or unpleasant, I find I can waste quite a lot of time browsing through music or "catching up" on likely useless Slack conversations. Since I've moved them to a text-based interface, I do feel I am wasting time like this far less often.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#12

Post by tomsmeding » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

mbrock wrote: post #9

The way I see it, my whole computing environment is necessarily a kind of place. Emacs happens to be a really good one. So, I use Emacs as a window manager. My computer boots into a full screen Emacs, so I don't think of it as opening Emacs — I think of my computer as an Emacs-based thing, which in turn contains a bunch of other tools (like M-x shell for running shell commands). The way the author uses xterm with tmu…

> I find that language mode regexps so often get confused that they're more annoying than convenient.

For what language modes do you have that experience? I haven't used emacs myself much, but in other editors, most syntax highlighting descriptions are pretty good. The only exception to this rule is highlighting Haskell, which is apparently a monstrous challenge that no-one can even do remotely well.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#13

Post by mbrock » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

tomsmeding wrote: post #12

mbrock wrote: post #9

The way I see it, my whole computing environment is necessarily a kind of place. Emacs happens to be a really good one. So, I use Emacs as a window manager. My computer boots into a full screen Emacs, so I don't think of it as opening Emacs — I think of my computer as an Emacs-based thing, which in turn contains a bunch of other tools (like M-x shell for running shell commands). The way the author uses xterm with tmu…

> I find that language mode regexps so often get confused that they're more annoying than convenient. For what language modes do you have that experience? I haven't used emacs myself much, but in other editors, most syntax highlighting descriptions are pretty good. The only exception to this rule is highlighting Haskell, which is apparently a monstrous challenge that no-one can even do remotely well.

It's really, really hard to make a completely correct mode based on regexes—just consider the challenge of writing a regex that correctly highlights the syntax of regex itself, which you need for JavaScript, Ruby, and lots of other languages.

Heredocs in shell, metaprogramming tricks in Ruby, reader extensions in Lisp, nested quotes, etc etc etc—I might be weird, but I feel like I run into these edge cases a lot, when editors think my parens are unbalanced when they're actually not, and so on.

Auto-indentation rarely formats things the way I want, too, and I very rarely need anything more advanced than shifting blocks in and out.

I also just find it a bit strange that we have culturally started to believe that editing code is nearly unthinkable without different colors everywhere!

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#14

Post by mbrock » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

suprfnk wrote: post #10

heavenlyblue wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I mainly understand the point author tries to make: for example, it takes time to learn all of the shirtcuts in any GUI application (let's say, Slack) and become a power-user in it; so why not have a proper console interface if it's the same case for pushing buttons? Nevertheless Slack still manages to do it badly: Cmd+Shift+K takes 3 seconds to load the list of channels for a quick jump. How's that considere…

> it takes time to learn all of the shirtcuts in any GUI application I'd say in most cases it takes more time to learn a console application. GUI's these days are, mostly, pretty intuitive. CLI applications are not intuitive at all. The difference is, for me, that GUI use quickly levels out in efficiency. _If_ I have learned the CLI commands and know them well, I generally can do tasks a whole lot quicker than a GUI…

CLI programs that have decent --help feel very intuitive to me, especially if they're designed by someone with experience using command line tools.

GUI programs can be intuitive too, but they also have their own special anti-intuitive things: meaningless icons, weird drag and drop paradigms, etc.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#15

Post by cellover » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

i3wm has been a huge productivity boost for me as a development machine at home for the following reasons:

  - no distractions
  - minimalism, most navigation on the keyboard
  - easy to setup a startup script that preloads your default screens / workspaces / apps setup
  - easy to map your workspaces in your mind

From machine boot to coding: 30 seconds.

https://twitter.com/Phonosheet/status/952179820447911936

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#16

Post by b0rsuk » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

I thought I was alone.

Every one of us minimalists draws the line somewhere else. I like vim, Python, Rust, RSS, web of documents rather than web of applications, static blog generators, roguelike games, symbols and symbolic graphics in computer games and boardgames. I prefer Ultima IV graphics to Ultima V graphics , because the latter started drawing individual torches, chairs, dishes, bushes, etc.

I'm not anti-modern. I just have an eclectic taste. I pick what I consider the best of various areas. I dislike most social media. I would like Twitter if it wasn't overrun by bots. I have a phone I can throw and break a window with, in fact I fell on it from my bike and it's still okay, but my clavicle broke. When people are starting at their smartphones I either look around (in a bus etc), at other people, through window, or read a book. I'm saving for an E-ink device, it's too bead the technology stagnated because of tablets and smartphones.

I hate being labeled a luddite or cranky because I don't sheepishly run into every innovation. Not all change is progress.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#17

Post by nextos » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #8

I've been running basically the same stuff for the last six years. I have a somewhat modified fork of dwm, a lightly modified version of Termite (simplest working VTE3 terminal I could find), and my emacs (which has had basically the same configuration for the last four years). Most things take up the whole screen or the left or right division of it. I run the same thing on my high memory Xeon workstation that I do o…

Do you prefer VTE3-based terminals to urxvt?

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#18

Post by coldtea » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #2

Interesting read, but ultimately I was left confused as to the purpose of the article. As far as I can tell it was to express the author's disdain for the modern web stack (an embarrassment for web devs, to be sure) and to advocate using vim (yawn).

>As far as I can tell it was to express the author's disdain for the modern web stack

It goes into way more than that.

If by "purpose" you mean "what I get out of this", then not much. It's a rant, not some tutorial.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#19

Post by microcolonel » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 3:04 PM UTC

nextos wrote: post #17

microcolonel wrote: post #8

I've been running basically the same stuff for the last six years. I have a somewhat modified fork of dwm, a lightly modified version of Termite (simplest working VTE3 terminal I could find), and my emacs (which has had basically the same configuration for the last four years). Most things take up the whole screen or the left or right division of it. I run the same thing on my high memory Xeon workstation that I do o…

Do you prefer VTE3-based terminals to urxvt?

Yeah, I need iBus support for Japanese and Cyrillic input, and VTE3 interacts very well with input methods. I also find that VTE3 has the most legible (antialiased) text rendering and spacing/geometry of all the terminal emulators I've tried on Linux or OS X, especially when compared at smaller text sizes (7pt, for me).

The default keyboard shortcuts are also pretty great in standard VTE3 terminals like Termite and GNOME Terminal (Ctrl + Shift + V for paste, Ctrl + Shift + C for copy), though that isn't specified by VTE3 itself. Rectangular selection works better in VTE3 than in URXVT or XTerm.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#20

Post by patrickmay » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

"There’s a way in which you could say that Emacs is a place whereas vi is a tool."

As an Emacs user, I agree with this. The author's preference for more tools and fewer immersive applications still resonates with me because I see Emacs as a place for all the tools I need for development and writing.