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How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

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Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#141

Post by TeMPOraL »

addicted wrote: post #135
jolmg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common to think that the goal of UI design is always about being as intuitive as possible, to minimize potential learning curves until they're basically non-existent. I don't think that's the only worthy goal, though. Intuitiveness and power are often opposing goals. You often see a way to make an interface more powerful, let the user work more effectively and/or efficiently, at the cost of intuitiveness and hav…

I largely agree with your post, but disagree with the idea that intuitiveness and power are often opposing. I believe that intuitiveness always helps with power. It’s just that the audience when defining intuitiveness shouldn’t only be limited to newbies. Unfortunately, we seem to conflate “intuitiveness” with “intuitiveness for newbies”. However, if you’re creating new power features, those features will always be b…

You're correct, and the world would be much better place if UX design was conscious of that distinction. That said, I think GP was talking strictly about "intuitiveness for newbies" being opposed to power. Unfortunately, even modern developer tools are being designed as "intuitive for newbies".

EDIT:

I think a good example of intuitiveness aiding power would be shortcuts in Vim vs. Emacs. In Vim, shortcuts are created as a grammar, and they're to a great extent consistent. They tend to form "verb modifier(s) object" combinations, and each of the components can be learned separately[0]. Whereas in Emacs, there are bunch of conventions, but beyond that, shortcuts tend to have a form "modifier verb-phrase", with "verb-phrase" mapping directly to some command. This results in much less consistent - and thus much less intuitive - set of keybindings.

--

[0] - See https://medium.com/@rafeco/the-grammar-of-vim-f86482876f46 for elaboration on the topic.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#142

Post by warent »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #87
plexicle wrote: post #78

"Not every machine has VSCode, Sublime or Atom installed, but every machine has a terminal." I love that the article goes from this sentence immediately to: "These are the main programs I use to make my terminal a complete development environment:" And proceeds to list 5 different programs, some of which are only available on macOS. Brilliant. Edit: One of which are only available*. My point isn't that there isn't a…

Using the terminal at least makes you proficient with the lowest common denominator of tools. I know I can SSH into any random machine, and edit a config with the copy of vi/vim it has, even if it doesn't have my fancy plugins. And if I get a new machine, all I have to do is install my tools via Apt/Brew/etc, clone my dotfiles repo, and run an install script.

Still though, the article feels overkill. I use VSCode for example and I'm still comfortable enough with a terminal to vi/vim, install/update, manipulate files, search, etc. Yet I'm not nearly as productive vim as I am with VSCode.

Basically it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing sort of deal. Just find the combination that makes you productive, and if you find that your productivity is suffering because of one of your tools then address it accordingly.

So far this article reads more like a zealous hyperbolic "It doesn't matter if you think you're productive. You're deceiving yourself and your tools are trash"

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#143

Post by nickjj »

wvenable wrote: post #108
nickjj wrote: post #63

I think the biggest win for primarily using a terminal based environment isn't because Vim or other terminal editors lets you write or edit code that much faster. Using command line tools and writing little scripts that you can easily integrate into Vim or another terminal editor really helps you solve your own problems that help make you faster at doing what you're doing. It really opens you up to thinking about how…

Of course, you can bind terminal commands to keys in VSCode (or virtually any other environment) just as easily. Personally I think these terminal vs. IDE discussions always revolve around straw man arguments and mythical divides. I can chain 5 unix commands together and use my IDE to navigate through code with my mouse. I don't have to choose one or the other and then feel superior about excluding a whole branch of…

> Of course, you can bind terminal commands to keys in VSCode (or virtually any other environment) just as easily.

But what if those terminal commands need to interact with your editor?

How would you set up a simple VSCode key bind to take the currently selected text, run a shell script using the selected text as input and then replace your selected text with the output of the shell script?

With Vim, this kind of mentality is baked into how you work with the editor. Even as someone who is very new to Vim (about a month) it only took a minute of Googling to figure it out.

After having used Sublime Text for about half a decade, followed by VSCode for a year I never even thought to do something like that either. I just took the easy way out of thinking "yeah I'm not going to make a custom plugin for this, I'll just settle for some worse implementation that someone else wrote that does 75% of what I want". But just weeks after using Vim, I'm finding myself adding all of these little customizations that are specific to things I do every day. It feels like my editor is working for me, not the other way around.

> I can chain 5 unix commands together and use my IDE to navigate through code with my mouse

I use the mouse in terminal Vim too. I don't really care about what purists have to say. For certain things I find using the mouse easier, so I use it.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#144

Post by jolmg »

soVeryTired wrote: post #122
TeMPOraL wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is only true, firstly, when what you're trying to represent can be accurately, completely, and most concisely represented by plain text. That's actually a fairly narrow range, unless you're a programmer. You would be surprised. I encourage you to visit the lands of Emacs at some time. The reason Emacs feels like an OS is because it turns out that quite a lot of tasks can be accurately, completely and concisely…

> To anyone who believes this, that vim is hard to learn: I ask you to do this challenge. Fire up vimtutor, spend 10 minutes on it, report back whether it's still hard. I'm learning right now - as in, I started on Sunday. It's not hard to learn, but it's hard to use effectively. I could edit code twice as fast if I reverted to my standard keybindings, but I'm waiting for muscle memory to build. Learning isn't hard, b…

Yes, the more your resist that urge, the faster that muscle memory will develop. It's even faster if you take a second to think of the most keyboard efficient way to do things with vi-keybindings and doing that, resisting the urge to use simpler keybindings. For example, `a` instead of `li`, or `A` instead of `lllllllllllla`.

Another important point is that one should never try to move around in INSERT mode. If you do, you're limiting yourself to moving around with the arrow keys and also are grouping multiple edits that you may want to undo piece by piece with u. If you need to move around, change to NORMAL mode and then move.

Yes, it's normal to hit Escape a lot. Personally, I like to have CapsLock act as Escape with `setxkbmap -option caps:escape`. If I ever really want to write something in all caps, it's always seemed faster to hold Shift with my left pinky.

> It's like learning to touch type all over again.

A very apt way to put it. Touch typing is like learning a language for your fingers. You do it once for your language (e.g. English), and now you're doing it for vi NORMAL mode, which is basically a language for text editing and navigation.

Like TeMPOraL said though, if you feel the frustration getting to you, you can just relax however much you want, and take things at the pace most comfortable to you.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#145

Post by eitland »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #87
plexicle wrote: post #78

"Not every machine has VSCode, Sublime or Atom installed, but every machine has a terminal." I love that the article goes from this sentence immediately to: "These are the main programs I use to make my terminal a complete development environment:" And proceeds to list 5 different programs, some of which are only available on macOS. Brilliant. Edit: One of which are only available*. My point isn't that there isn't a…

Using the terminal at least makes you proficient with the lowest common denominator of tools. I know I can SSH into any random machine, and edit a config with the copy of vi/vim it has, even if it doesn't have my fancy plugins. And if I get a new machine, all I have to do is install my tools via Apt/Brew/etc, clone my dotfiles repo, and run an install script.

> And if I get a new machine, all I have to do is install my tools via Apt/Brew/etc, clone my dotfiles repo, and run an install script.

If I get a new machine I only install

- dotnet core

- Visual Studio Code

Finished.

Both are available on all mainstream platforms that you might want to use, including Linux, Windows and Mac.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#146

Post by IronBacon »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #87
plexicle wrote: post #78

"Not every machine has VSCode, Sublime or Atom installed, but every machine has a terminal." I love that the article goes from this sentence immediately to: "These are the main programs I use to make my terminal a complete development environment:" And proceeds to list 5 different programs, some of which are only available on macOS. Brilliant. Edit: One of which are only available*. My point isn't that there isn't a…

Using the terminal at least makes you proficient with the lowest common denominator of tools. I know I can SSH into any random machine, and edit a config with the copy of vi/vim it has, even if it doesn't have my fancy plugins. And if I get a new machine, all I have to do is install my tools via Apt/Brew/etc, clone my dotfiles repo, and run an install script.

I don't know, with SSH access to a machine, I would edit the remote file with Emacs on my local machine via Tramp or using SSHFS.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#147

Post by lucasfcosta »

Hello everyone, thanks for all your feedback!

Regarding IDEs and bloatware: here’s a more detailed explanation of that argument

https://lucasfcosta.com/2018/08/05/In-Praise-of-Plaintext.ht...

They’re not always bloatware, they have meaningful use cases, I just don’t think most of them are in the domain of software engineering specifically.

I’ll take some time to go through comments in more detail at another time and address them in the post if they’re relevant to the context.

Thanks again for all the amazing feedback.

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#148

Post by gcb0 »

olig15 wrote: post #18

I'm a game developer mainly writing/reading/debugging C++ on a codebase that's well over a million lines of code. As with most game-dev I'm developing almost entirely using Visual Studio, and I can't imagine trying to navigate code using a terminal based editor. Maybe it's just because this is what I'm used to, however I just don't see how some of the tools would even be displayed in a terminal (parallel stacks windo…

Learning a text editor plus ctags (etags) plus how to integrate your text editor to N compilers (syntastic) will make you equally proficient without fiddling with one IDE for each language.

It sounds lame early in your career, but after a while, switching between C++, java, JavaScript (ok this one requires a little more involvement because the browser is the compiler of sorts), typescript, etc is very easy.

When you switch languages/projects it is just a matter of opening a file with a different extension. All your text editor muscle memory is still there.

If you use IDEs, today you are on a project that only builds in eclipse, tomorrow intellij, then you move back to C++ and have to use visualstudio... and you don't even know the Go To Line keyboard shortcut or Text Search...

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#149

Post by eitland »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91
gambler wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This isn't Starcraft, very few developers are limited by their APM throughput through the UI. Made me smile. This is a great analogy. Tactics vs strategy. You can become more efficient at low-level tasks by doing faster text editing. However, as you get into actual software engineering, the first time you need to do some semantic refactoring will wipe out any time you saved through low-level efficiency.

> However, as you get into actual software engineering, the first time you need to do some semantic refactoring will wipe out any time you saved through low-level efficiency. That applies to Java and C# only, where the language grammar is so simplified that you can be 99% confident semantic refactoring didn't screw your code up. > You can become more efficient at low-level tasks by doing faster text editing. It's not…

> That applies to Java and C# only, where the language grammar is so simplified that you can be 99% confident semantic refactoring didn't screw your code

Some of us would say well-designed instead of simplified :-)

Re: How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal

#150

Post by ianstallings »

This dead argument seems to re-animate itself once a year or so. But my question is this: Why not learn both the IDE of your choice and how to use your terminal/vim? No need to arbitrarily limit your own knowledge and abilities. It just makes you stronger.
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