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Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

#141

Post by reissbaker »

greymalik wrote: post #106
reissbaker wrote: post #103

The Vim/Neovim ecosystem has gotten unbelievably better over the last 5-10 years. "Living in the terminal" for core development work is IMO better than pretty much anything else out there; my Neovim setup has a modern plugin manager; an IDE-like experience with fast autocompletion as I type, goto definition, and automated refactor support; and a side-drawer file browser navigable with Vim motions. It feels like an ID…

What setup/plugins do you recommend for using Neovim as an IDE replacement? I use vi for minor text editing but have never used it for development.

I've had great success with coc.nvim for IDE-like features; it manages language servers for you: https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim

For file browser side-panes there are tons of options, but no one ever got fired for using the venerable old NERDTree.

The rest is mostly just tmux!

Re: Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

#142

Post by reissbaker »

yeswecatan wrote: post #114
reissbaker wrote: post #103

The Vim/Neovim ecosystem has gotten unbelievably better over the last 5-10 years. "Living in the terminal" for core development work is IMO better than pretty much anything else out there; my Neovim setup has a modern plugin manager; an IDE-like experience with fast autocompletion as I type, goto definition, and automated refactor support; and a side-drawer file browser navigable with Vim motions. It feels like an ID…

Do you have your dotfiles on github?

I do, but I keep the repo private. I've seen too many people accidentally check their keys into public dotfile repos.

coc.nvim (https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim) is a great starting point though!

Re: Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

#143

Post by 29athrowaway »

ilovecaching wrote: post #138
29athrowaway wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you: - Edit code - Autocomplete - Navigate code, find references, go to definitions - Run your code - Debug your code - Test your code (including running a specific test) - Profile your code - Run multiple static analyzers simultaneously - Use version control and annotate code using version control - Do all that remotely or with containers involved - Query a database and get results in a tabular format - Spell ch…

Yes you can do all that stuff with like 2 plugins LITERALLY BUILTIN: - Edit code - Do all that remotely or with containers involved - Spell checking ALE: - Autocomplete - Navigate code, find references, go to definitions - Run multiple static analyzers simultaneously DISPATCH: - Run your code - Debug your code - Test your code (including running a specific test) - Profile your code FUGITIVE: - Use version control and…

By the time you are half-way configuring that I am already done with my tasks.

By the end of the first sprint you'll have carpal tunnel syndrome.

Re: Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

#144

Post by reissbaker »

29athrowaway wrote: post #136
bananadonkey wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything up to and including spell checking, yes. In fact none of those first items are remotely unreasonable to do in a terminal, rather surprising to see them being used as arguments against the terminal. - vim, neovim, Emacs configured with LSP - https://git-scm.com/ - http://aspell.net/ - https://github.com/tmux/tmux - https://github.com/dbcli Emacs also exists which runs in the terminal mostly (I only miss ima…

IntelliJ does all that much better than what any vim plugin can. DataGrip wipes the floor with pgcli How do you find duplicate code with that setup?

I've used IntelliJ plenty, and it's pretty bad at most of those tasks. Using the git CLI is much better for version control than the Jetbrains GUI wrapper; using Docker itself rather than a wrapper is much better for containers; etc etc. I'm sort of amazed the question of "can you do version control in a terminal" is even being asked... That's where git originated! That's the git team's primary development focus even today!

"Can you run multiple static analyzers simultaneously"... That's sort of the point of *nix systems: multiple processes running simultaneously. Using the shell is of course going to allow that, especially with something like tmux!

Most of the editor questions were also answered by my original post (and the answer was yes).

Re: Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

#145

Post by pfp »

easrng wrote: post #28
cweagans wrote: post #19

> - My company uses Slack's enterprise auth, and all the CLI slack clients I could find haven't been updated in years and no longer work. https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack is decent. > - The web is using more javascript than in the past. cli browsers are probably the only truly unrealistic thing. An idea that I've been kicking around for a while is to build a simple CLI "browser" that uses PhantomJS or similar u…

You might be interested in https://brow.sh

Holy shit that's an impressive browser.

Some glitches for sure and I couldn't actually draw in Excalidraw, but I obviously wasn't expecting to.

Re: Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

#146

Post by heavyset_go »

notyourwork wrote: post #129

Many of our latest hires (new college grads) struggle with terminals and CLI in general. It seems like recently students have stopped getting this exposure which leads to them joining and not knowing how to ssh into a damn linux VM. It's a pretty daunting world.

I've talked with professors about this, and it seems that if students want to learn how to use the terminal, they need to figure it out themselves or take whatever UNIX/Linux-related classes that are offered, and those classes are usually electives and not required.

Apparently some professors are leaning more and more on desktop & cloud IDEs, and other development platforms that just let students code and not worry about the rest. The argument is that abstracting away system administration allows teachers to spend more time on the content they need to teach versus spending time setting up and debugging systems.

Re: Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

#147

Post by acapybara »

jmcphers wrote: post #132
greymalik wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What setup/plugins do you recommend for using Neovim as an IDE replacement? I use vi for minor text editing but have never used it for development.

In addition to all the language servers folks have already pointed to, Github Copilot works -- surprisingly --- great in Neovim. Tim Pope (author of fugitive and many other popular Vim plugins) wrote the integration. https://github.com/github/copilot.vim

Have this running in Termux on my phone.

Copilot + nvim + Termux makes it reasonable to code on a phone.

Re: Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

#148

Post by gpanders »

adriand wrote: post #119
lelandbatey wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's really only one "class" of plugin that's a "must have" to turn Vim (Vim or Neovim) into an IDE replacement and that's some kind of Language Server integration; there are several you could pick, they all allow your Vim to automatically start and talk to a local Language Server, giving you all the fancy autocomplete/go-to-definition/inline documentation/etc that you expect from an IDE. Otherwise, I dunno, maybe…

I use Neovim all the time but although I do have some linters installed I find all the fancy stuff so much worse than in a more visually appealing editor. I love vim and I do have a lot of affection for the terminal but things get extremely visually noisy with language servers in a way they just don’t with a more graphical interface. It sucks because I want to use vim for TypeScript dev but I just can’t stand it comp…

Can you explain what you mean by “visually noisy”? If you’re referring to the diagnostics messages (virtual text and signs and such), that is easily configurable to disable (I would know, I wrote it)

Re: Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

#150

Post by jll29 »

notyourwork wrote: post #129

Many of our latest hires (new college grads) struggle with terminals and CLI in general. It seems like recently students have stopped getting this exposure which leads to them joining and not knowing how to ssh into a damn linux VM. It's a pretty daunting world.

It's upsetting to see how children's and young people's education gets dumbed down. I went to a toy shop earlier this week and the kits for scientific experiments (chemistry, electronics) have been dumbed down compared to the 1980s. Back then, you had a huge box with chemicals and tools and a proper 100+ page handbook full of experimental instructions (chemistry) or resistors, transistors capacitors etc, and a handbook full of design schemas that you may want to construct e.g. a little radios (electronics). Now you can do "20 safe experiments" like making a LED flash.

In computing, students want to do their coursework on their iPad in a notebook environment, relying mostly on step-by-step instructions given as PDF file or from an online tutorial, based on copy & paste, without understanding what they paste there instead of compiling libraries or write a makefiles from scratch.

Starting next summer, I will include a 2-3 hour UNIX command line (and also a 2-3 hour LaTeX) intro into all courses I teach where that can be justified. (The UNIX Power Tools [1] book is a useful resource for teaching, I found in the past.)

[1] https://www.amazon.de/Unix-Power-Tools-Classique-Us/dp/05960...

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