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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?

#191

Post by gregjor »

alwillis wrote: post #182
pram wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I don’t really understand the point in being a terminal maximalist. Yes, I do 90% of my work in vi or ssh and that’s what I prefer. Checking my email or chatting though, why bother? The company pays for outlook and slack, I’d just be making my life pointlessly difficult.

The overhead of context switching is a thing. Running a bunch of Electron apps to handle basic things slows you down and takes an unnecessary amount of system resources. Most users can’t automate GUIs to create workflows, assuming the apps and the platform being used even support that. Scripting CLI tools has existed since the dawn of Unix.

> The overhead of context switching is a thing.

Yes, and that happens regardless. I can turn off notifications and choose when to look at email or Slack or whatever. I can have those apps on my iPad screen and ignore it or put it in focus mode. If you're talking about switching applications that's just a keystroke whether I'm in screen/tmux or in MacOS.

> Running a bunch of Electron apps to handle basic things slows you down and takes an unnecessary amount of system resources.

All of the native apps I use work faster than I do, I don't think they slow me down. System resources have come a long way since the early days of Unix you refer to. None of my devices struggle with low resources. I mainly work on remote servers so that's where I compile and test code and so on, and those machines don't have GUIs or apps hogging up resources.

>Most users can’t automate GUIs to create workflows, assuming the apps and the platform being used even support that.

Sure, and even fewer users can do anything at the command line.

> Scripting CLI tools has existed since the dawn of Unix.

I remember. That happened about four years into my career as a programmer. I didn't start to see Unix in the wild for a few more years. Scripting CLI tools pre-date Unix but they sure got nicer when Unix took over.

I'm happy to use the command line for almost everything I do in terms of programming. But some of what I do to keep my customers happy involves communicating with them, reading stuff they send, etc. I can't force my customers to stop sending PDFs or HTML emails or links to Zoom calls, nor would I want to. And I'm not going to live with 1970s technology in imitation of Richard Stallman, because however great the terminal and Unix CLI can work for so many things, they aren't the best tool for everything.

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

#192

Post by stonecharioteer »

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.

Look up astronvim for a pre-configured setup that'll work for you. You cam try that and add your own stuff in the user configuration. It's pretty easy.

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

#194

Post by nequo »

29athrowaway wrote: post #177
phailhaus wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally nobody is asking you to use vim. In fact, I don't recommend it to newbies, and warn that a lot of setup is involved. But I am 100x more productive in it than any other IDE, or seen anyone else with an IDE. It works for me. It may not work for you, that's fine.

Quoted post unavailable.

You might be well served by not seeking out the company of vim users then. There’s better things to spend this life on than arguing about editors, plugins, and keybindings.

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

#195

Post by mekster »

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…

You sound like a sales pitch but my NeoVIM based off of AstroNvim breaks in very random ways across a dozen of servers even under same configuration, I'm about to try Helix instead of the ecosystem with pile of random quality plugins.

It looks promising at first with LSP and all that but I don't know when I had any stable moments.

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

#196

Post by mekster »

rockwotj wrote: post #186
thomasahle wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an LSP that allows refactoring Python code like PyCharm? I haven't found any other tools that does simple things like extracting a function, renaming or inlining variables. For example, vscode's Python support is terrible.

Jetbrains IDEs have refactorings that are light-years ahead of any LSP functionality. I can use nvim for simple or small code bases, but for any real work project I've had to use IntelliJ. For example, I had a VSCode coworker who was asking to switch all typescript string union types to enums so they could be refactored, but IntelliJ is able to refactor (in this case rename) the string union types

Right. vim (and the likes) are only good for server side config editing but these days remote plugin of vs code can also take that role away.

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

#197

Post by Per_Bothner »

WorldMaker wrote: post #35

I wonder if you included a JS REPL/console in your terminal if you'd hit an interesting enough hybrid. Something like Puppeteer/Playwright where you can spin up headless Chrome instances from the terminal, interact with them and automate them in JS. Treat the JS as a mini shell script language in your terminal of choice. I'm almost surprised there isn't yet a terminal that is an intentional JS-hybrid where you can RE…

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) isn't quite what you asked for: It only indirectly has a JavaScript console: Since its frontend is a browser engine, you can open up a JavaScript debugger. However, DomTerm can display "rich text" - html, images, mathml and more. Also, there are (tentative) plans to allow loading JavaScript scripts for interesting extensions.

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

#198

Post by doix »

29athrowaway wrote: post #151
reissbaker wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Using the git CLI is much better for version control than the Jetbrains GUI wrapper For some things. But for reviewing activity in git, and tracking changes across time, doing it in the terminal is unproductive and sucks. (e.g.: 10 levels deep of git blame) > 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 somethi…

> For some things. But for reviewing activity in git, and tracking changes across time, doing it in the terminal is unproductive and sucks. (e.g.: 10 levels deep of git blame

The shit I've seen IntelliJ users do in git repos is insane. Somehow they create merge commits between their local branch and the origin version of their branch. They've lost changes, rewritten history, all sorts of shit, with 0 understanding of what or why. I'm guessing the warnings come as a pop-up and people instinctively just click ok without reading.

> Sure, but how much crap do you have to memorize? It's not a unified experience. It's a duct-taped Frankenstein where every subsystem works differently.

From your replies it's pretty obvious you have made up your mind. But what you are describing is my exact experience with JetBrains. The good thing about JetBrains tools is that their language analysis stuff is truly state of the art and significantly better than the equivalent LSP stuff out there. Apart from that everything is a Frankenstein setup that works differently.

In vim, all those plugins are just splits. So I can navigate between them with just ctrl+w->h/j/k/l (most people rebind to ctrl + h/j/kl). Each split supports the vim hotkeys by default, because that is the design of vim.

In intellj it's an incoherent mess. Every pane has some weird fucking hotkey that makes 0 sense. You cannot just go "select the pane on the left). The hotkey is ctrl+shift+alt+7 or something insane, to the point where it's not worth it and you just need to click everything.

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

#199

Post by BoorishBears »

Melatonic wrote: post #66
zh3 wrote: post #34

I keep a 'perfect terminal' in the office, basically a system with an nvidia 7600 in it because that's the fastest 2D text thing I've found to date (yes, modern cards are so slow in text mode it's not even funny). Configured for 24 VT's, a bunch of them autoconnect to remote systems/run specific applications etc at boot - so if I want the calculator, for example, it's Alt-F12. For local graphics programs, that also p…

What do you mean by fast or slow in text mode? Like the 7600 is literally writing text to the screen faster than modern cards or?

Reading commends like this makes me so grateful I never got into the whole terminal deal and grew up coding on shitty computers.

In my blissful ignorance I could produce just as much effective code on a VNC machine competing with a 1080p Netflix stream on a rural DSL line as I could on a local machine in TTY mode.

The brain is really amazing at what it can adapt to, when I'm typing in a laggy situation it's like "see" the output of what I've typed before it's on the screen and end up being comfortable doing stuff like fixing a typo before it's even been reflected on the screen

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

#200

Post by raydiatian »

I still find it utterly baffling that Windows and Apple haven’t integrated better “hyper-productivity” oriented workflows into their OSes. I’ve tried (and failed) on multiple occasions to “ditch the mouse” for full keyboard nav but it always comes up short around the browser. Even VS Code has pitiful keyboard-only navigation support.

These days I pretty much work exclusively in terminal, having gotten used to vim mappings and just sticking with it. Still, I’d rather be on a desktop.

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