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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?

#231

Post by netmonk »

ryandrake wrote: post #184
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care so much what workflow some rando on the internet uses?

Not OP, but to me, software that requires installing multiple plugins and extensions on top of it and requires much configuration in order to be useable is basically "unfinished software". It's 2022. Software not just has to work out of the box (or out of the download), it has to be packaged with everything needed to actually use it. It has to come fully configured for the most common use cases, or be able to fully c…

To be honest, VIM doesn't require plugin installation to be fully functionnal.

The main problem with VIM is that nobody reads the documentation, and jumps directly trying to configure vim to imitate what they experienced with other softwares.

Most VIM users never understand VIM philosophy and inner mechanism supporting it. They just try to bend VIM into another graphical code editor.

It's like the meme about "exiting vim". It is pointless. Once you understand VIM you never need to exit it. Just Ctrl-z or use neovim terminal if needed.

The best challenge i was given by VIM guru, when i was asking help installing dozen of plugin, was to read the vim doc (:help) and just use for 6 months a VIM pure vanilla, without any plugin and minimal vimrc. After more than 20 years using VIM daily, i just understood i never learn how to use VIM and were just an adept of CARGO-CULT, victim of mass spread anti-pattern.

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

#232

Post by rockwotj »

mekster wrote: post #196
rockwotj wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I'd much rather use vim than VSCode

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

#233

Post by Lio »

jalbertoni wrote: post #137
tpoacher wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim? Heck I can do all that with nano ... wth are you talking about?

I'm curious, how would you handle collaborative editing in nano? All the others seem doable if a bit hacky, but that one confused me.

I’m a (Neo)Vim user rather than Nano but off the top of my head, I’d use tmux to share a Nano session on multiple computers at the same time.

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

#234

Post by rockwotj »

ar_lan wrote: post #204
mekster wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This just simply isn’t true. Neovim is perfectly capable of (and I would argue excels at) being a daily driver on large projects.

It can be yes, especially depending on what you're doing. I'm so much more productive with some of the impressive refactoring actions. An example cool one for me in React is "Extract Component" where you can pull out a component and it automatically picks out your props (including types for TSX).

A recent example is that I removed all import cycles from our app last week (there where over 200) and I was able to do this purely with the IntelliJ "move symbols" refactor in a codebase of xxx,xxx lines of typescript. I can't figure out how to move a symbol to another file with LSP. I spent the first year of development at my current job when working on the front end and I'm simply more productive in IntelliJ compared to vim - I'm in vim for everything else tho (as long as it's not kotlin/java as I can't get LSP working for JVM projects).

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/react.html#react_refacto...

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

#235

Post by rockwotj »

ar_lan wrote: post #222
mekster wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to JetBrains, no thanks. I can't even get Neovim to run stably without throwing random errors every now and then, especially after I update plugins.

I do love JetBrains products. But they were too memory-hungry for me. I stepped away from GoLand and into Neovim and it’s been by far the best experience the past year and a half. So far, there is not a single feature I miss or haven’t been able to duplicate. Regarding stability - pinning plug-in versions could be helpful. That’s what I’ve done and I’ve never had an issue with stability.

Agreed - neovim is plenty stable for me. The built in package management and git submodules in my dotfiles works really well and is dead simple.

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

#236

Post by stackbutterflow »

ryandrake wrote: post #184
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care so much what workflow some rando on the internet uses?

Not OP, but to me, software that requires installing multiple plugins and extensions on top of it and requires much configuration in order to be useable is basically "unfinished software". It's 2022. Software not just has to work out of the box (or out of the download), it has to be packaged with everything needed to actually use it. It has to come fully configured for the most common use cases, or be able to fully c…

What you describe is rather 1995. Bloated vendor piece of software that tries to do too much and comes with a vendor manual.

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

#237

Post by zh3 »

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?

Yes, much much faster. The 7600GT will do about 900k characters per second (stock) or 600k at 160x60 using ter-u20b font. Last time I tested, a GTX580 does about 187k per second but that's in stock 80x25 VGA mode without a framebuffer; to get a direct framebuffer the only option I'm aware of is nouveau, and that drops the rate to about 14k per second (so only just better than the equivalent of 1FPS at 160x60, as thast's about 10k characters on screen at once).

Some of the kernel changes that are happening may well make it possible to have simple high-speed framebuffers that can be used for text consoles in the future, so there's still hope.

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

#238

Post by trasz »

spac wrote: post #88
ehutch79 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get out much do you? Not if you consider that a hellscape.

I find this comment absolutely inappropriate for this forum.

There are two ways to read that comment. One is like you say. The other - as “someone who doesn’t go out much”, this actually resonates, in a weird way: “the Unix way” resulted in user having a proper control and their environment being predictable and thus trustworthy. Compared to that, the web is not only technologically inferior (Chromium LoC alone is enough to tell), but also as unreliable and unpredictable as many other things IRL.

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

#239

Post by avean »

About browsing, I had difficulties with Lynx as you can't use tabs. The last versions of Elinks were broken on OS X and outdated. I found a fork of elinks (Felinks) that offers everything I want and is easy to configure.

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/network/felinks/

https://github.com/rkd77/elinks

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

#240

Post by zh3 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #199
Melatonic wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed, I started in the days of 40x25 video terminals at home, and new-fangled stuff like modems were only just starting to appear (my first one was 300 baud). Getting a job and having 9600 baud VT100 terminals was truely magic (they still have a teletype for printing work orders on).

However, I've never been tolerant of lag - having a time gap between doing something and having a response just adds to mental workload, it's friction between me and the machine (especially pronounced with IDE's that try to 'help' by taking a second or two to come up with a suggestion, by which time it'll have been left in the dust).

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