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Good Tools Are Invisible

gingerbill.org

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Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#191

Post by jibal »

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…

> Obsessive hacker tools like Emacs are not a productivity enhancer.

This is intellectually dishonest framing. "obsessive hacker tools" is incoherent -- it's not the tool that is obsessive or a hacker. I don't obsessively hack emacs--I barely know elisp--and emacs is very much a productivity enhancer for me. The main benefit of the hackability of emacs for me is that hackers write useful packages for it that I occasionally run across and install.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#193

Post by woodruffw »

“Good tools are invisible” is not an objectionable thing to claim, but the example used is confusing: a power user of vim presumably feels like their flows are invisible, just like the author feels like his Sublime patterns are invisible. It’s not clear at all that there’s any “good tool” quality to tease apart between the two.

(I say this as a long-time Sublime user.)

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#194

Post by b-kf »

"The year of the Linux desktop still isn’t upon us (in 2026), and part of the reason why it has taken so long to get to that point is fundamental: a lot of the people who use Linux love fiddling with configuration files to reshape their system"

"part of the reason", yes, besides people's familiarity with Windows, it being pre-installed, Linux's splintered ecosystem in general, games, drivers for hardware, and so much more...

But what I want to contribute: LLMs like codex can be brilliant for custom setups, maybe not for the layman, but for the now lazy but previously-into-tuning your setup person with an itch remaining. For years I've not been wanting to tune my system, I have actual work to do. A few hours spent configuring a tool for small marginal gains is hours I could spend more productively.

Hence, Default Ubuntu with Gnome, good enough, let's do actual work. But I as I get to work more away from my desk setup (hence away from a docking station and external monitors) and more on my Laptop alone, I recently started to long for my i3 setup from years ago...

A few hours of prompting codex and I have sway set up w/ vim like keybindings, all the information I want in a task bar (I couldn't even tell you which, swaybar I think), a good launcher for applications that I like (it's graphically fancier than the simple default launchers for tiling wms), have kitty as terminal with awesome shortcuts for tab navigation, have bash aliases for saving and loading terminal sessions, no shortcuts (sway versus vim vs kitty) are in conflict, all overlap beautifully and make sense (different modifier keys, but same vim motion like fundamentals). I can simply pull the plug on my docking station or re-attach and everything keeps being fine.

So I have a custom setup, custom to me, that especially on a single screen makes me far more productive, setting it up is 10% the time it used to be, making changes in the future will be 10% it used to be, and I still a) leveraged the capabilities for customization and b) it being simple text based configs I can still leverage that going forward and c) have still the insight if needed (looking at the configs).

Codex on Linux in general feels like a super power. Due to the heavy text-based workflow Linux allows for, the Composability of terminal tools etc, I doubt working together with an LLM on setting up a system could work so well on any other system.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#195

Post by stackghost »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #167
jrimbault wrote: post #13

Having designed a good number of internal tools for teams of developers I couldn't agree more. Earlier I had the tendency to "leave the guts" open, thinking my users were developers and would want that. All it did was put obstacles in my teammates actually doing their work. My teammates must use the tools I made for them to achieve work the company needs them to do, they don't want, nor should they want to, fiddle wi…

vi and emacs were designed by legendary computer scientists at two poles of the keystroke latency gradient. Bill Joy was on a model from an apartment in Berkeley, RMS was codifying the collected wisdom of a whole pool of elite typists on TECO and was doing so on the kind of connections at the MIT AI lab. Both of them were more or less stuck with QWERTY. A keyboard interaction paradigm isn't a given chip or a driver f…

RMS may be legendary but he's no John Carmack or whomever else. I use emacs every day, and nobody who does the same can honestly say the foundations are good. The performance is atrocious. The UI locks up when you make network calls because the whole thing is single threaded. The whole thing is a mess of spaghetti code and there are multiple instances of core developers like Eli Zarerski admitting on emacs-devel that they don't know how works.

RMS is a visionary but as an actual software developer he's pretty mid.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#196

Post by noah7z »

How does this apply to non-personal-computer-based tools? Heidegger has some cool commentary on the topic. I think good tools can be invisible, but they also unlock new capabilities, almost like a new bodily sense or a new organ. It's easy to focus on a text editor's removal of friction between thought and text, but I also wonder what new capabilities our tools will unlock.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#197

Post by nullsanity »

jrimbault wrote: post #13

Having designed a good number of internal tools for teams of developers I couldn't agree more. Earlier I had the tendency to "leave the guts" open, thinking my users were developers and would want that. All it did was put obstacles in my teammates actually doing their work. My teammates must use the tools I made for them to achieve work the company needs them to do, they don't want, nor should they want to, fiddle wi…

[dead]

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#198

Post by slopinthebag »

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)…

I've never managed to make the terminal work for me. But I've been using windows since I was like 5 and I'm really bad at remembering shortcuts besides a handful of ones I use every day.

> When you reach that point, you will be, on average, much more productive than an average GUI user

How sure are you about that? I often watch streams of people using emacs or vim, with totally custom setups and it seems like a wash to me. They look like wizards doing some stuff, and then other things seem slower than my own workflow.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#199

Post by slopinthebag »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #137
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)…

> — Well, in my FrobnicatorStudio, there's a shortcut Ctrl+Alt+So for that When I get those people typically I'll switch to Emacs (it's always open), use dired and rename 20 files at once, using either a keyboard macro I make on the spot or using a regexp replace. This usually not only get them to shut up for good, they also typically then see me as the "computer wizard". I demo'ed some terminal (piping command calls…

I don't think I've ever had to rename 20 files at once, so I wonder if the way people work is kind of shaped by their tools?

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#200

Post by slopinthebag »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #148
bluGill wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reaching for the mouse doesn't break my flow. It makes the thing I was doing invisible in the flow. Keyboard shortcuts require me to think, which makes it FEEL like I'm doing something, and that something is in the flow so it feels like I'm productive. However the mouse doesn't even enter into the flow at all, I just do the thing and get on with the real work without breaking flow. Again, there is no universal correc…

I have an anecdote to contribute. I been doing a lot of Bender. Keyboard on left hand and Mouse on right. The keyboard shortcuts in Blender are excellent, but there are _many_. I know this sounds silly, but what really breaks my flow is moving my mouse from the middle of the screen where my model is, to the top of the screen where the menus is. I bought a Stream Deck which is a programmable keyboard with 32 buttons a…

I use blender a lot too. I bind space to search and then use that instead of shortcuts for pretty much everything that isn't the few shortcuts I've memorised (and g/s/r xyz etc)
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