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How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

lucasfcosta.com

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Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is only true, firstly, when what you're trying to represent can be accurately, completely, and most concisely represented by plain text. That's actually a fairly narrow range, unless you're a programmer. You would be surprised. I encourage you to visit the lands of Emacs at some time. The reason Emacs feels like an OS is because it turns out that quite a lot of tasks can be accurately, completely and concisely…

> To anyone who believes this, that vim is hard to learn: I ask you to do this challenge. Fire up vimtutor, spend 10 minutes on it, report back whether it's still hard. I'm learning right now - as in, I started on Sunday. It's not hard to learn, but it's hard to use effectively. I could edit code twice as fast if I reverted to my standard keybindings, but I'm waiting for muscle memory to build. Learning isn't hard, b…

You'll get there. I'm at the point where my accidental nano sessions look like jkjkdd:q! because I can't remember how to exit it and I can't stand navigating an editor with arrow keys anymore.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see data on this, any studies done?

A healthy skeptic doesn't demand data for claims like "touch typing is faster than hunt-and-peck".

A healthy skeptic? Lol what? Anyone who feels they have a point should be able to back it up with sources or data

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A healthy skeptic doesn't demand data for claims like "touch typing is faster than hunt-and-peck".

A healthy skeptic? Lol what? Anyone who feels they have a point should be able to back it up with sources or data

No. Reality is not established by publication. You can, and should, observe some things for yourself.

It is obvious that touch typing is faster than hunting and pecking for most people who:

- have 10 fingers

- have invested sufficient effort to learn touch typing

To demand sources for this is disingenuous.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been a big debugger user, but I thought if you like LSP, you might be interested in Microsoft's analogous debugger protocol: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/debugger-... I imagine Emacs, vim, and friends could implement their own frontends for this, much as has been happening with LSP.

Wow, thanks! And it turns out, Emacs and vim do implement their own frontends for this - [0], [1]. My wish just literally came true! [0] - https://github.com/emacs-lsp/dap-mode [1] - https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector

Awesome - glad to be of assistance!

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me sketch you something of a theoretical proof here, then. 1) Any command you can issue by clicking or scrolling on something, can also - in principle - be issued by pressing a key on a keyboard. Therefore, any automation you hide under a mouse-activated command doesn't matter, as it can be invoked by keyboard too, and faster. 2) The absolute upper bound on the simplest possible way of aiming at a single pixel of…

For your point in 1) that won't apply on any kind of navigation. I have to ls -l / dir multiple times to view whats in my folder and go back up with various key presses, versus just hitting the breadcrumb in windows explorer. Not sure I fully understand 2-4 but the fundamentals still remain, i want to do a git pull i alt tab to my command line, already two presses, then i find my src directory, and pull. Or just righ…

> i want to do a git pull i alt tab to my command line, already two presses, then i find my src directory, and pull. Or just right click on my IDE and click pull?

Or you're using Magit, in case of which it's "C-x g" to switch to magit from any buffer associated with project (a file, compilation output, whatever), and then "F p" to issue a pull from origin. Which is 4 key presses (6, counting CTRL and Shift), and likely in your muscle memory. Every other git command is accessible similarly.

Point being, for any mouse interface like this, you could - and in vim/Emacs, often do - have a similar, but more ergonomic keyboard interface. Points 2-4) were about showing that this applies to almost all software in general, not just to editing code.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A healthy skeptic? Lol what? Anyone who feels they have a point should be able to back it up with sources or data

No. Reality is not established by publication. You can, and should, observe some things for yourself. It is obvious that touch typing is faster than hunting and pecking for most people who: - have 10 fingers - have invested sufficient effort to learn touch typing To demand sources for this is disingenuous.

I can observe the sun is hot, but doesn't mean I can tell what temperature it is. I think without data of timings across different applications and uses, it's hard to prove either side. I am open to both sides having the possibility of being quicker

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For games, especially non-trivial ones, GUIs are fucking great. I couldn't possibly imagine writing game code without them. Anything else really visual, like CSS, and I need a GUI to feel productive. It's because the changes in the system are dynamic and cascade in unexpected ways. You make a box a little thinner and a heading flows to a new place and now the space between the heading and the image is off, etc. But I…

> Anything else really visual, like CSS, and I need a GUI to feel productive. It's because the changes in the system are dynamic and cascade in unexpected ways. You make a box a little thinner and a heading flows to a new place and now the space between the heading and the image is off, etc. Do you have some GUI for manipulating CSS with click&drag? Otherwise, isn't this use case handled by having an editor and a bro…

I was mentioning CSS because it's something that almost everyone here has experience with. I don't know anyone that doesn't use a GUI to tweak or experiment on things when they're broken. I use Chrome Dev tools, but there are many other GUIs out there. It's true that I still write the first pass in emacs, but the first pass isn't often enough.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#238
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Navigation is rarely the limiting factor in development speed Here in spaghetti enterprise land it is. Quite often the biggest challenge to any given story is understanding the impact of a single line change on a code base. And since we decided to split a single bowl of that spaghetti into nuget packages the more "primitive" tools like ctags are the best way to navigate the project, they don't care about pesky thin…

> Quite often the biggest challenge to any given story is understanding the impact of a single line change on a code base. Isn't that a test coverage issue more than a navigation issue ? Opening 3 files via keyboard shortcuts vs opening them by clicking on 3 different buttons won't solve spaghetti code and low test coverage.

Code coverage is really high, legend has it that code coverage was tied to bonus a decade ago. The tests typically add more mental overhead than reduce it due to this.

> Opening 3 files via keyboard shortcuts vs opening them by clicking on 3 different buttons won't solve spaghetti code and low test coverage.

It doesn't solve it, but it makes it quicker and easier to navigate, it's not just the shortcuts but the navigation stack (go to declaration, go to declaration, go to declaration, pop, pop, got to declaration, pop, pop, etc) that make it easy. Tmux and/or vim are also much better at multi-window editing than IDE's which is also handy.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#239

Used Atom and other IDEs for 5 years. 3 years ago switched to vim + tmux and love it. I'm very productive with my setup and I can't imaging going back. I also love that I can git clone my dotfiles + an install script and I have my full dev environment on any machine in 2 minutes.

[deleted]

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#240
post #15

Title is a bit misleading. Not sure this is "I'm not using GUIs" but rather "I'm using a terminal-based dev environment". I was hoping to find some nice terminal-based tools for browsing and e-mail and all the other annoying real-life things I need to use

the web browser is the only thing for me that is not shell-based... maybe Firefox will come through and create an alternative.
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