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Good Tools Are Invisible

gingerbill.org

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Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#81

Post by jshaqaw »

Obsessive hacker tools like Emacs are not a productivity enhancer. But If you find them fun go for it. You are allowed to have fun. You are allowed to enjoy your environment. If tinkering with Emacs is fun for you go for it. It's prob not replacing mental cycles for "productive" work. It's replacing zoning out with social media or YouTube between productive work times.

I can't justify using Emacs myself on a productivity basis. But working in an environment I think is fun while being productive makes me marginally happier.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#82

Post by dhosek »

jb3689 wrote: post #72

Do people have fun building vim macros? Vim macros are awesome because they don't involve reading manuals, memorizing obtuse key commands which you never use on a regular basis, or understanding weird configuration lines - you just use the editor the way you normally would except you're hitting record. Vim's power is that I can be editing, notice I don't have something, make it in 2 minutes, and then get back to more…

“memorizing obtuse key commands which you never use on a regular basis” is exactly why I prefer Emacs over vi(m). The default configuration on Emacs works like most other contexts—I can just use the arrow keys to position a cursor and type.

And then, at least on the Mac, some of the basic commands in Emacs carry over not just to the terminal, but to things like text input windows in Safari and other Mac-assed apps so I can almost always use ctrl-a to go the beginning of a line, ctrl-e to go to the end, ctrl-k to delete to the end of the line and sometimes also I get esc-del to delete the previous line although that works in terminal, but not a Safari input window (and escape gets captured in IntelliJ’s terminal which kind of stinks).

I do feel that common config across a team is always a good thing. I’ve been the only IntelliJ guy on an Eclipse team and the only Eclipse guy on an IntelliJ team and both cases were worse than conforming to the convention.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#83

Post by tecoholic »

ClawsOnPaws wrote: post #42
tecoholic wrote: post #38

Keybooard and Mouse. Everytime. I have the same question. How much do you type in a day that moving the hand to the mouse is a productivity loss? I spend a lot of time staring (thinking, planning) than typing. So, moving my hand to the mouse and back barely has any impact.

It has a pretty profound impact on me, since the only way I can use a computer is using a screen reader, which works primarily using a keyboard. It can read things under the mouse, but it is not at all a comfortable way of working.

Thanks for explaining the context. It makes sense in your case where using mouse is a hard constraint. My reaction is more towards people who optimise for productivity.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#84

Post by eigencoder »

I'm not sure about this.

One of my favorite tools is my bicycle. To me, the user interface of my bicycle is totally invisible. I just pull it out of the garage, hop on, and away I go. And it's not like I enjoy my bicycle as a "puzzle" either -- I just want it to go somewhere.

But to my 6 year old, the user interface is quite literally fear-inducing. Everything about the tool is very "visible" to him. Does that make it a bad tool?

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#85

Post by sph »

gingerBill wrote: post #52
sph wrote: post #17

I am afraid the author confuses familiarity with proof that his tools are better. The reality is that every tool has a trade off, and if a user prefers tool X compared to tool Y, it’s not because they are dumb, but likely they make better use of the affordances of that tool that only a power user would get. Give a developer 10 years each with vim, emacs and Sublime Text, they wouldn’t be so sure which is better. [1]…

> I am afraid the author confuses familiarity with proof that his tools are better. Literally NOT what I was implying or even said anywhere. Quote me where I said anything like that. To quote myself: > What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great. This has nothing to do with why…

People don't use vim because they enjoy puzzle solving. I don't even know how you got this conception. People use vim because they are effective at editing with vim, period, just like you are effective with Sublime Text.

People don't use Linux because they enjoy tweaking config files and everybody else has too busy a life to do that. That's a silly misconception and veiled attempt at feeling superior at those time-wasters.

> rather treating the flaws as if they are things to have a puzzle game to work around

Case in point.

Good tools are indeed invisible, but the arguments the article is built on are very shaky and honestly just sound from someone that didn't spend much time with other tools, but still has strong opinions about them.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#86

Post by gingerBill »

jshaqaw wrote: post #81

Obsessive hacker tools like Emacs are not a productivity enhancer. But If you find them fun go for it. You are allowed to have fun. You are allowed to enjoy your environment. If tinkering with Emacs is fun for you go for it. It's prob not replacing mental cycles for "productive" work. It's replacing zoning out with social media or YouTube between productive work times. I can't justify using Emacs myself on a producti…

Which is kind of what I was arguing. Understand that having "fun" is not necessarily equivalent to being "productive". And even by an individuals own standards, the two can be completely different.

If you are having fun, and it's a hobby: who cares? If it's in the professional setting, make sure what you are doing is not actually wasting time and/or money, i.e. be productive.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#87

Post by gingerBill »

elsjaako wrote: post #68
bitwizeshift wrote: post #8

Well 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 do…

> You just edit as normal while recording, and replay those edits later.

And there is the problem. The first time you do the edit, it might be fine, but when you make a mistake in the edit, you then have to go back and correct all of the cases. With multiple cursors, I am seeing instant visual feedback on all instances of the cursor at once. I am getting literally 2D spatial information, compared to the 1D spatial information per each replay. The multiple cursors approach is better not because it's a different mindset or whatever, but rather it produces a different feedback loop to correct mistakes.

If you still prefer the macro approach over the multiple cursors approach, then you do you. But as an example in the article, I have seen people think they are being productive by their own standards, and they really aren't.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#88

Post by dhosek »

The Linux on the desktop one was the biggest “hell, yeah” moment for me. 99% of the desktop preference is familiarity. Since my personal computing has been on a Mac exclusively for the last 24 years and I’ve not used Windows for work more recently than 2018 (and it was sporadically the case in the decade before that), when I do use Windows, it feels like I’m typing in molasses. A Linux desktop feels like I’m typing in molasses with casts on both hands. That the desktop varies depending on the distro and whoever decided on the defaults makes it that much worse.

Meanwhile, I largely use a vanilla setup in MacOS. The only changes in the UI I make beyond the default are installing rectangle and flycut, switching the default keyboard to ABC-Extended and turning off caps lock. Everything else runs with default settings and I’m happier for it, especially when I need to do something on someone else’s machine. Losing those minor customizations doesn’t make the machine unusable or introduce too much friction.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#89

Post by MrManatee »

ventana wrote: post #11

As a long time terminal user, it does not surprise me much when people just don't get it . The discussion often goes like this: — In a terminal, I can do so-and-so with a simple command — Well, in my FrobnicatorStudio, there's a shortcut Ctrl+Alt+So for that and this can go forever, going into pretty much useless comparisons like "in vim, I can delete 24 lines by pressing four keys" (no Sublime user ever needs that)…

If we make a distinction between CLI apps and TUI apps, my interpretation is that the article was specifically talking about the latter.

By a CLI app (with the emphasis on command line) I mean something like grep, sort, cp, git, ls, tar, etc. The normal way of interacting with these is by writing commands on the shell, which means that if you know how to use it normally, you can also use it in a script. Which means that you can combine these into pipelines.

By a TUI app I mean (and I think the article means) something like Vim, Emacs, Tmux, Lynx, Tig, Midnight Commander, Claude Code, etc. - an interactive app that takes over your terminal while you're using it. You're not going to compose those into a pipeline. Or to be more precise, you're not going to use them in pipeline by using them the way you normally use them. If you can use them, it's probably because the app decided to provide a command-line interface in addition to the TUI.

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