Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

fig.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 390 posts

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#371

Post by Cyberdog »

mschrage wrote: post #286
Cyberdog wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a background in Swift development. Then why on earth did you go out of the way to implement this in JavaScript instead?

The current implementation of Fig is a native macOS app (Swift/ObjC) that exposes an API to access terminal specific information - edit buffer, working directory, current process, etc. On every platform we support, we'll implement this natively. As Fig grows, we want to enable an ecosystem of UI extensions for the terminal that are built to go cross platform. Using web technology here made sense since we can leverage…

I don't understand this response, so let me rephrase my question.

This page https://fig.io/docs/getting-started says that Node.js and NPM is required to use Fig. I presumed this meant that Fig was written in JavaScript, but you're saying it's native. Then why is Node required? If you're using web views for UI, wouldn't those web views on each respective platform already have their own JS engines?

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#372

Post by michaelpb »

bloopernova wrote: post #261
michaelpb wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this project totally completely baffled me. "Autocomplete for the Terminal". What?? Bash has had fully programmable auto-completion for over 20 years [1] -- and that's just one comparitively bare-bones shell, out of dozens that are all free forever and not spyware. Watching their demo didn't help either. At most the behavior seems an incremental improvement over what Bash ships with in most distros, and it's not…

It feels like the devs are completely clueless about open source, command line, and modern shell features. There's so many great projects for bash and zsh add-ons like fzf.

Right: Assuming good faith, this project seems completely backwards.

But if their real product is the telemetry that also ships with it, and they've identified that many newbie developers have a hard time seeing through marketing pages directed at developers (eg like "webscale" stuff from mongodb circa 2010), then it, unfortunately, makes more sense.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#373

Post by 908B64B197 »

samblr wrote: post #178
dvt wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just adding, from their website: > Investors: We've raised several million dollars from amazing VCs like General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins, and angels like Jason Warner, Adam Gross, Olivier Pomel, Scott Belsky, Will Gaybrick and a handful of other impressive dev tool founders and executives. The fact that a CLI tool raised millions of dollars while also being basically powered by open-source contributions is also…

I just wanted be a fly on the wall when Fig founders were pitching to these investors on how they are gonna make money. Can NOT this tool say to my employer - How many times I compile my code in a day ? When I get a compilation error - how quickly it gets to compiling state again ? Was the compilation error a trivial mistake ? How much time is spent between each commands ? How productive I am keying in command one af…

> Can NOT this tool say to my employer - How many times I compile my code in a day ?

That would be a completely useless metric.

Also, don't you have a daily build pipeline anyways?

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#374

Post by meowface »

marlor wrote: post #333
arcturus17 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF indeed. There has to be some grand vision behind this, presumably large-scale data capture. At the end of the day, the terminal is is to the dev what Google is to the internet user: the point of entry where many journeys begin, with dozens or hundreds of interactions every day. And while devs are a niche market compared to Google's userbase, they are a lucrative and strategic one nonetheless. Casting aside the en…

Yes, but when you’re Googling, you’re searching for public information. When you’re using the terminal, you’re mostly manipulating your own data, often in ways that would reveal sensitive information if your terminal history was leaked. Any attempt to collect data from users’ terminal interactions is indistinguishable from keylogging.

They could rationalize it as only capturing the commands and not the arguments, or something. (If that's indeed the long-term plan. No clue; for all I know data collection isn't intended as the business strategy whatsoever.)

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#375

Post by gtf21 »

dangom wrote: post #172
gtf21 wrote: post #24

I don't really understand what's so different from the ZSH completions which I already have in my terminal but with no data leaving my machine?

People who can configure their shells are not their target audience. For once, if you walk into any research center or academic environment and look over the shoulders of people who have to code or use a terminal because they have no other option, you would see that the vast majority know little beyond cd and ls. I wouldn't be surprised some would pay for directory completion alone. Can those who know what zsh mean d…

Perhaps, but then a better option would be to contribute back to the ecosystem by creating a nice DSL to compile back to zsh etc. completions and making a nice installer on top of that. I don't see how "autocomplete in your terminal" is really a company given that the people who would pay for tools like this will probably be power users, who would (I assume) prefer the built-in tools.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#376

Post by [deleted] »

mschrage wrote: post #230
zumu wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? > 3. Requirement of email. > 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others. Dovetailing on these... Like why is a CLI tool VC backed? Is the business model just selling our data? Is the VC backing for another product and the CLI tool is just a PR thing?

> Is the VC backing for another product and the CLI tool is just a PR thing? Autocomplete is our first product. The bigger vision that Fig can enable an ecosystem of terminal extensions. Here are some early prototypes we built [0] and here is the discussion from when we were posted on HN last summer [1]. > Is the business model just selling our data? We will never sell data. That just isn't the business we want to bu…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#378

Post by samblr »

908B64B197 wrote: post #373
samblr wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted be a fly on the wall when Fig founders were pitching to these investors on how they are gonna make money. Can NOT this tool say to my employer - How many times I compile my code in a day ? When I get a compilation error - how quickly it gets to compiling state again ? Was the compilation error a trivial mistake ? How much time is spent between each commands ? How productive I am keying in command one af…

> Can NOT this tool say to my employer - How many times I compile my code in a day ? That would be a completely useless metric. Also, don't you have a daily build pipeline anyways?

While debugging and coding.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#379

Post by dangom »

f6v wrote: post #349
dangom wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who can configure their shells are not their target audience. For once, if you walk into any research center or academic environment and look over the shoulders of people who have to code or use a terminal because they have no other option, you would see that the vast majority know little beyond cd and ls. I wouldn't be surprised some would pay for directory completion alone. Can those who know what zsh mean d…

> if you walk into any research center or academic environment If they use their institution's infrastructure, it's managed by the dedicated system admins. No way they're going to allow this tool to be installed.

You install it in your own terminal on your own computer, not on the institutions' computers. Also, for research that doesn't handle personal identifiable information (think civil engineering or astronomy), I don't think it'd be an issue to have Fig read the parts of the filesystem to which admins gave you read access anyway. Hopefully autocomplete would work over ssh.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#380

Post by f6v »

gspr wrote: post #355
f6v wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you walk into any research center or academic environment If they use their institution's infrastructure, it's managed by the dedicated system admins. No way they're going to allow this tool to be installed.

While I have exactly 0% belief in the success of Fig, and share a lot of the negative sentiment expressed in this thread, your parent post does make a point. I spent 10 years in the kind of academic setting described. A LARGE part of the work of the people in this example do their work on ordinary self-managed laptops without a sysadmin in sight (and probably very little common language in which to even begin communi…

There definitely is a point. I've witnessed too many biologists who decided to get into data analysis struggle with UNIX. I think https://missing.csail.mit.edu is more of an answer. Most graduate programs just assume you'd pick it up on your own, but the majority doesn't.
Post reply on HN