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Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

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Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#151

Post by 12ian34 »

nerdponx wrote: post #137
12ian34 wrote: post #80

Nice website, but I wouldn't switch to this from Fish/Zsh on account of: 1. Cannot identify any killer features above what I already have with forever free tools with much larger support communities. 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? 3. Requirement of email. 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others. 5. Not available for Linux, and I get the feeling that Linux woul…

#1 I do not agree with. This is a great idea for a tool, and I am willing to pay for it. This is an extension to my terminal and a useful adjunct to my shell, not a replacement for either. #5, maybe but that's fine. Lots of things are Mac-only or Linux-only. It's a proof of concept. Moreover they appear to be working on some kind of standard specification for completion meta-data, which other tools can start to adopt…

#1 That's fair. Each to their own. For me I wouldn't be willing to pay even £1 a year for it.

#2-4 Firstly, just because it can be forked is not to say that it will. It's not easy to maintain a whole project in your spare time. Also, this may be a moot point since the completion engine is supposedly proprietary (as per another commenter).

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#152

Post by mwcampbell »

stakkur wrote: post #86
12ian34 wrote: post #80

Nice website, but I wouldn't switch to this from Fish/Zsh on account of: 1. Cannot identify any killer features above what I already have with forever free tools with much larger support communities. 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? 3. Requirement of email. 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others. 5. Not available for Linux, and I get the feeling that Linux woul…

You summarized my exact feelings about it, especially #1, 4, and 5. I get the feeling that the team hasn't done their homework on potential users and existing solutions.

No, I think it's incumbent on us developers to be more willing to pay for things. We know now that free doesn't really work.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#153

Post by msoad »

ggregoire wrote: post #140
fmakunbound wrote: post #112

How do you make a company out of this?

From their jobs page [1]: "We've raised several million dollars from amazing VCs like General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins, and angels like Jason Warner, Adam Gross, Olivier Pomel, Scott Belsky, Will Gaybrick and a handful of other impressive dev tool founders and executives." [1] https://boards.greenhouse.io/fig

Docker raised even more money. Devtools monetization is the hardest problem in the startup world. It's been tried again and again because lots of startup founders are devs and they want to solve their own problems but ultimately nobody wants to pay for it

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#154

Post by mschrage »

swyx wrote: post #144
brendanfalk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our server also crashed when we first posted this. Try running `fig update` in your terminal. This will download the most up to date version of Fig's completion specs

ah ok so you got hugged to death, nice. but... why is Fig phoning home to your servers when i'm typing? what's local and what's not? this is alarming. does it go down if i am offline or have "lie-fi"?

Fig does not "phone home" when you type!

When you install Fig, we download the most up-to-date completions specs using the Github release API. (You can see them in ~/.fig/autocomplete). We got rate limited this morning (thanks HN!), so some people downloaded Fig, but didn't have any completion specs available.

Don't worry: all of the completion happens locally on your machine. None of your keystrokes or raw text from your terminal leaves your device.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#155

Post by Closi »

adkadskhj wrote: post #97
mschrage wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just want people using Fig and enjoying it! That's our top priority. Don't feel bad at all about opting out of telemetry :)

Fwiw, i won't be using this because i can't buy it. I don't use any dev software that's not either FOSS or purchasable. Over the years i've suffered enough at the hands of changing monetization strategies that it's just viewed as risk for me. Even if it stays honest and never dark-patterns me, i expect at the very least the service will change in some way. Failing entirely, dark patterns, etc. My preference for simpl…

I get this - it’s the whole “if you aren’t the consumer you are the product” piece.

I like using companies where your relationship with them is obvious (ie I pay money and they give me services) rather than mysterious (Ie I use Google and they use my data in a way I don’t quite understand to make lots of money from me with me never paying them).

If the first monetisation strategy doesn’t pay off what comes next? Ads in the terminal? Increased telemetry to sell to companies? Sudden removing of features put behind a paywall?

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#156

Post by woodruffw »

brendanfalk wrote: post #120
woodruffw wrote: post #111

I noticed that you're using macOS's Accessibility API to provide your autocompletions. That's a clever use, and it sidesteps a huge source of pain when trying to make terminals smarter (i.e., dealing with the TTY/PTY layers, terminal capabilities, &c). My question, since you mentioned that Linux support is "not an afterthought": how do you intend to support Linux? Your architecture on macOS is essentially a (benign)…

Early versions of Fig essentially used a keylogger to predict what you had typed in the terminal. This is not optimal from a security or product standpoint. We have since integrated with the shells themselves (e.g. with zsh's line editor, ZLE for zsh). This allows us to get what you've typed more accurately and for your shell only. We are also working on new integration done exclusively through pseudoterminals. Both…

Thanks for the response! It's good to know you've moved away from that approach. I'm probably not one of your end users (I'd prefer an open-source or source-available client), but I look forward to seeing the progress you make on this.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#157

Post by jokethrowaway »

pclark wrote: post #131
12ian34 wrote: post #80

Nice website, but I wouldn't switch to this from Fish/Zsh on account of: 1. Cannot identify any killer features above what I already have with forever free tools with much larger support communities. 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? 3. Requirement of email. 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others. 5. Not available for Linux, and I get the feeling that Linux woul…

#2 is really quite absurd - especially here of all places - how do you decide if a product or service will never "sell out"?

I generally try to avoid startups and either go for established companies (business offers are more likely to stay there and work as expected) or small bootstrapped business (cheap, more likely to stay true to their roots, do one thing well without breaking everything in the future).

Startups are good for free trials as they have VC money to spend or finished deals (purchase once, consume once, forget about them).

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#158

Post by coltons »

Looks really cool, but I would always use zsh-auto-complete. Maybe your market is for people that prefer GUI's over terminal, but like terminal power, or the newer generation of coders who went to code school and are not the older school terminal in the weeds people (sorry for a generalization)

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#159

Post by GordonS »

ttul wrote: post #121
jjwiseman wrote: post #92

When it required me to enter my "work email" to "connect with teammates" before I could use it, I dragged it to the trash.

You are clearly not the ideal customer profile.. my guess is that the Fig team are going after corporate developers who won’t be as concerned about privacy so much as they are concerned about convenience and productivity.

As someone with the misfortune to work in a large enterprise, this doesn't make sense - corporate are very sensitive to data leaving their network. As just one example, the place where I work very rarely let's us use anything cloud-hosted (Slack is just one example). And when the do, it's a years long process to get it.

I haven't looked into how this works, but if it's sending keystrokes or command lines to the cloud (one of the founders is here, please do correct me if I'm wrong!), it has no chance of being used in your average corporate environment.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#160

Post by shaicoleman »

mschrage wrote: post #18
jcastro wrote: post #13

I need this for Linux!

We are planning on going cross platform! What distro / terminal emulator do you use?

I use kitty on Linux Mint (Ubuntu based)

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

Kitty has a terminal graphics protocol

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html

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