Good Tools Are Invisible

Not who you’re asking but:

- I have a very long legacy of both muscle memory and “just right” coziness in my Emacs environment, that has followed me around from machine to machine since about 2003.

- I have flip-flopped between GUI Emacs and terminal Emacs probably a dozen times, with my most recent flop being due to Codex and Claude Code, which I run side-by-side with Emacs in a split pane tmux window.

- Yes, best of a bad bunch. I am also reasonably comfortable in Vi(m) but dislike how it handles having many open files, which is unfortunately necessary for most of the work I do.

- I have used VSCode off and on over the years as well, most recently with Gemini, but found the GUI experience quite frustrating and the lack of a CLI option ended up being a show stopper (I sometimes need to write code over SSH and the way VSCode handles remote editing is highly unpalatable to me)

Edit: one other nice perk that I discovered the other day: Claude is quite good at elisp. I was having a really weird issue that seemed like it sat at the intersection of a few packages interacting funny. Put Claude on the problem, got a very detailed explanation of how three packages had evolved and how one of them hadn’t caught up with subtle changes the other two had done. Put together a patch and suggested I make a PR to upstream. I haven’t fully reviewed the patch but the bug seems fixed properly.

That's because it's practically impossible to collect objective data here, i.e. without confounding factors.

A product where the user spends 99+% of their time reading/consuming is almost certainly easier to use with a GUI. The market settled on thumb-flicking for doom scrolling instead of a button or scroll wheel interface, for a reason.

A product where the user spends 99+% of their time writing is almost certainly easier to use with a keyboard. Most sane people do not write essays on their phones with two thumbs; a keyboard and a proper word processor are preferred.

Most products fall somewhere in the middle. Most products have multiple interfaces, some primarily for consuming information and some primarily for producing it, and thus would find different inputs more productive in different modes. When people claim that they find one input type is more productive than the other, most likely is that their particular use-patterns fall more in-line with the one most aligned with their use-patterns.

1. You're typing a message to your colleague, and you're doing it in Slack, Teams, etc. Why? Why not use your trusted editor where you probably already have smart completions, quick spellchecking, thesaurus, definition and etymology lookup, translation and dictionaries, LLM integration and more.

Years ago I realized that and stopped typing anything longer than three words in anything else but my editor. But that forced me to copy-n-paste a lot, so I automated the process. I'd press a key in the middle of typing - regardless of what the current app is, the script simulates pressing Cmd/Ctrl+a Cmd/Ctrl+c; opens the editor buffer; inserts the text; I'll do editing; press a key - it goes back to the app; pastes the text. Stupidly simple, deviously efficient. Suddenly, my entire OS is my editor and my tool is "invisible" - like the article describes.

2. You're typing a message to your colleague. Now you're doing it in your editor, you want to share the url to the thing opened in your browser. What do you do? Normally, you'd switch to the browser, press another key to focus on the navbar, copy the link, switch back, paste the link. Goddammit, the url is cryptic. You, being a good teammate, want to add a description, now you have to go back to the browser to copy it. Then you have to make it into a markdown link format. Darn it. Was it parens and square brackets, or the other way around? We don't even realize how often we do this, because this simple action has become a routine. What's the point of arguing if mouse or vim or shortcuts is faster if the action is fundamentally flawed? For me, inserting a link in the middle of typing, from any tab in my browser is within a keystroke. It intelligently and properly formats it while retrieving the document.title.

3. Your colleague sends you a message: "Hey Jon, what about FOOBAR-41234?..." You know it's a Jira ticket number. But between FOOBAR-41345 and -41234 and a bunch of other recent ones you have no mental recollection of what that number is about. You go to your browser, navigate to the Jira instance, darn thing says you have to re-login, now you're going through 2FA - it won't even let you-in unless you find your phone and confirm it. All that effort just to look at the title. We all recognize this familiar flow, don't we?

Why even deal with this BS at all? Jira, Asana, Trello, etc. - all have CLI tools, you should leverage that. In my editor, whenever the cursor stumbles on a pattern like above, it immediately fetches the ticket description and shows it in a popup. I can quickly convert the plain "FOOBAR-41234" into a markdown, org-mode, whatever link format that has a description.

4. You're looking at FOOBAR-41234, you even see the description (because your editor is smart now), but how do you answer questions like: "what are the PRs related to this ticket?", "find slack threads that mention it", etc.? That stuff should be quick and easy. Do get annoyed whenever it takes longer than two seconds to answer any of these or similar questions.

5. You are pair-programming over Zoom. Alice (your colleague) is sharing the screen, you are reviewing some big unit of work. She's scrolling through the code changes, occasionally opening documentation, navigating to different sites, etc. You just can't bear constantly interrupting her with "slow down, I'm taking notes", "please, share this link", etc. After the session you frantically try to recall, but most of it is gone now, your notes are whacky, containing a bunch of broken urls and half-typed nonsense. Three weeks later it is a complete and utter garbage. Then you spend years debating of note-taking strategies trying to figure out what "works" and what doesn't.

That should annoy you. Darn it, if I can see it on the screen, why can't the computer "see" it too? It irked me, so I hooked up Flameshot, Tesseract, and Emacs and now I can select any area of my screen and the text gets OCRed and pops in a buffer. It's not always accurate, but it is quick and I don't even have to tell Alice to slow down anymore.

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These are just a handful of examples, and I haven't even touched anything code related. Hopefully you can already see what I meant in my post above. Do liberate your text from the tyranny of complex GUIs, do get annoyed when you have to manually retrieve any piece of whatever. You're a damn programmer, computers and computer programs should obey your command, never forget that.

But if you contrast it with the complexity of the same functions on other aircraft, you start to see how complicated it really is. The F-22 for example handles a lot of faults (like engine fires) automatically.