I know the link is by the creator of Odin, but I can speak personally for my passion for seamless tools. I have ever had as seamless, high-flow of a development environment as I do now using Nim with Sublime on Mint at work. Every one of these tools is intended to slide out of the way of your thoughts, and they do so deftly. I'm never fighting the tools; instead, the tools are facilitating me transforming my thoughts into compiled programs. All of my time and energy is spent formulating a sound model rather than fiddling with configs or fighting obtuse features.
Good Tools Are Invisible
61–70 of 305 posts
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is unhealthy self-handicapping. Your "flow" is just habits, things you've taught yourself to do. You weren't born with the ability to use either a keyboard or a mouse, there is no "natural" or "intuitive" way to operate a computer. It's all 100% learned behaviors that can be altered.
>Your "flow" is just habits, things you've taught yourself to do By this logic a person who were comfortable with mouse should never grow to like VIM. > there is no "natural" or "intuitive" way to operate a computer. Fundamentally a computer is something that execute instructions. It is pretty poor interface to pick instructions from 100 options using a mouse as opposed to type it using a keyboard. A mouse hides the…
> By this logic a person who were comfortable with mouse should never grow to like VIM.
Quite the opposite, my argument is that habits are changeable.
> Fundamentally a computer is something that execute instructions. It is pretty poor interface to pick instructions from 100 options using a mouse as opposed to type it using a keyboard. A mouse hides the power of the computer behind a set of fixed clickable options. That is a pretty poor interface.
You continue to argue for my point. OP was claiming that measured efficiency does not matter because it's about "flow". I argue that one can teach oneself to flow differently, the commands can be learned.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#63Well this is a take. It’s weird how much the author fixates on Vim being “visible” and implies multiple cursors and features in Sublime aren’t. Just because your brain is trained to not think about it anymore doesn’t make it any less visible. Multiple cursors aren’t a native feature in many tools, it is still something to learn how to use, let alone effectively — just as Vim key bindings are. Plus, vim is more than j…
That's not what I was saying. I used vim macros specifically as an example, not Vim as a whole. > I’ve had people tell me how “fun” it was to build a macro to handle some one-off text-refactoring problem. But when I looked at what they were doing and how long it took, my honest reaction was: I could have done that in Sublime in a minute with multiple cursors, or just written a quick script. and > What baffles me is t…
The things about multiple cursors is that you think about the processing while doing it, while most people using macros looks at the structure of the text first and then devise the macro. I wouldn’t say the latter is faster, but it’s a different mindset.
And the other thing is that vim has the “dot” command to repeat your last edit. Similar to macros, you think about your local edit first, then about where to repeat it (usually tied to the next item in the search list).
Edit (after reading the article).
Both vim and emacs (which have the steep learning curve) are aimed at power users. It’s best to compare them to professional tools like CAD, DAW, industrial appliances,… The friction when learning is because a lot of users don’t know what’s possible to do or even have the kind of problems that experienced users do (or they fail to perceive them as issues). After a while, it becomes like an extension of your thinking and the tool disappears.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#64Agree that good tool should be invisible. We want essential not accidental complexity in how the tool works.
But good tool should also be fun and makes us feel productive. We can't neglect the emotional aspects of designs. And at the end of the day, if a less productive tool makes us much happier, we will less likely be burned out. That is productivity in the long term.
Maybe only AI Agent doesn't care about the emotional aspects fro tool use, but that's a separate topic.
Also, it's not about steep learning curves. We want low floor, high ceiling tools. Some of the examples the author used are either low floor low ceiling, or high floor high ceiling. Neither is ideal.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#65Well this is a take. It’s weird how much the author fixates on Vim being “visible” and implies multiple cursors and features in Sublime aren’t. Just because your brain is trained to not think about it anymore doesn’t make it any less visible. Multiple cursors aren’t a native feature in many tools, it is still something to learn how to use, let alone effectively — just as Vim key bindings are. Plus, vim is more than j…
What I find especially weird is that I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone describe vim as a puzzle that's fun to solve. The most common sentiment is that it has a learning curve, but ends up being worth it.
I don't think of vim as a puzzle, but I do use it because I find it fun to use in some ineffable way. Note that I also don't claim that it makes me more productive; I use it because it sparks joy, regardless of however productive it makes me.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#66Invisible work doesnt lead to promotion, hence FAANG companies stopped making invisible+good tools, if things are invisible they get deprecated or stay in KTLO and eventually die
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#67The article topic is interesting, but the example it picks to illustrate deserve the purpose a bit. There isn’t any text editor that is really invisible. Dæmons/services are invisible. Copy-paste single clipboard is invisible. Switching displayed context is invisible.
Probably becoming skilled at using Sublime afterward become nice in some cases, but personally I never achieved the cumbersome of integrating multiple text pointers in my habits. In the rare occasion it feels like it might be useful, I know I will need to look at what are the keyboard dance moves again, and by the time I go search for it, my brain already generated several ready to go alternative paths to achieve the change. And I don’t even know if it can do things out of the box like `:grep pattern-to-select-buffer | g!:pattern-line-to-exclude:s:initial-string:target-string:g | update`. That’s already awesomely powerful for this level of granularity.
But that’s a rare case where to make the tool shine: most editor deal with full literal substitution just as well (if not better in term of UI), more complex refactors will be better dealt with with whatever decent modern IDE, and whatever more cases that want would want to cover using some more advanced macro is probably going to be just as easy to deal with a bespoke script.
Also Sublime is not everywhere. Nor is Vim or Emacs to be clear (as soon as you are outside of a Unix lineaged box). Though probably if one need to ssh in some remote box `vi` will most likely be an option, even busybox integrate one. But we are no longer talking about whole contemporary project edition here of course.
Still the underlying point is nice to highlight, melting it with editor war didn’t make it a favor.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#68Well this is a take. It’s weird how much the author fixates on Vim being “visible” and implies multiple cursors and features in Sublime aren’t. Just because your brain is trained to not think about it anymore doesn’t make it any less visible. Multiple cursors aren’t a native feature in many tools, it is still something to learn how to use, let alone effectively — just as Vim key bindings are. Plus, vim is more than j…
From the article:
> multiple cursors really are better than macros 99.999% of the time (since they give direct visual feedback)
I don't know what he means, vim macros also give direct visual feedback while writing them. You just edit as normal while recording, and replay those edits later. I think it is technically possible to write a macro without seeing the live effect on the text as you write it, but I've never done that.
I looked up multiple cursors out of interest, I guess the advantage is that it's one interface that is easy to explain. I would use multiple vim commands to replace it in practice.
I'll agree that multiple cursors are maybe better than macros for most of the things that someone would use multiple cursors for, but usually I wouldn't use macro's.
But I think most of the things I do with macro's cannot be done with multiple cursors.
I would be very interested in being proven wrong, if someone has some examples of "this is where multiple cursors are great, and vim doesn't have a good alternative".
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what I was saying. I used vim macros specifically as an example, not Vim as a whole. > I’ve had people tell me how “fun” it was to build a macro to handle some one-off text-refactoring problem. But when I looked at what they were doing and how long it took, my honest reaction was: I could have done that in Sublime in a minute with multiple cursors, or just written a quick script. and > What baffles me is t…
The things about multiple cursors is that you think about the processing while doing it, while most people using macros looks at the structure of the text first and then devise the macro. I wouldn’t say the latter is faster, but it’s a different mindset. And the other thing is that vim has the “dot” command to repeat your last edit. Similar to macros, you think about your local edit first, then about where to repeat…
Exactly. And I'm no purist - I'm happy to use "dot" with a mouse if I want to easily repeat an edit in tens of places if they're not nicely aligned or searchable.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#70The problem with the article is that it's two arguments pretending to be one. The first argument is about people. People romanticize the flaws of their tools, turn vim macros into a personality, and mistake the feeling of cleverness for output. Fine. True. Bill is correct that a lot of tool evangelism is tribal signaling dressed up as productivity advice. However, people join these tribes because they get benefit fro…
> Sublime is invisible to him because he's been at it for fifteen years.
It's not perfect and the bugs that have been there for years (and won't be fixed) have annoyed me for years too. The reason I still stick to Sublime is just because the alternatives that are similar are much much slower. I wish Sublime was actually invisible to me, but it isn't. It's just the most invisible I've found out of the alternatives.
> But the escape hatch is the whole problem with his thesis
I understand what you are saying, but the point of an escape hatch is that for the general everyday cases, the defaults should be good and invisible. But there will always be edge cases which you cannot handle nicely, either there hasn't been a way discovered yet which is better or there are other external accidental things which prevent it from being "nice" (not I am talking about tools in general and not just text editors, maybe even programming languages hint).
> The escape hatch and the learning curve that leads to it are the same object. He even admits it. He even admits it. In the learning-curve section he concedes a steep curve "could absolutely be a cost worth paying" if the payoff is real productivity. That's the entire counter-thesis.
I don't agree with your interpretation of my article. I am talking about certain people in particular that are saying the bad aspect of tool is actually good. If there is a high learning curve for a tool, it needs to eb compared to the current alternatives. But sometimes the curve is "essential" and cannot be improved upon, for better or for worse. I have yet to see many "essentially" high learning curves in the domain of programming.
I am not sure how to summarize the entire article other than what I already wrote in the conclusion.