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

lucasfcosta.com

21–30 of 248 posts

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

#21

I always find the benefits of portability to be a rather funny one: It's always immediately followed by 800 lines of dotfiles that do an incredible amount of customization. The IDE vs. vim/emacs purist debate is always crazy to me. There are some places where IDE's are almost certainly better: Java in a large project in IntelliJ has to be 100x better than in Vim. For new languages or languages where there isn't subst…

You are using Java as a convincing argument for using an IDE... Java... ugh..

If you use mainly statically typed languages where IDE static analysis, refactor tools proves super useful to you... keep using that set up.

I don't really see the appeal personally.

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

#22

For me, things like VIM where you first have to configure the hell out of it are a pain. Every time you're on some other machine, all your customization is gone. So after switching machines a bazillion times over the years, making the same little tweaks over and over, I've learned to deal with the default config. What I didn't expect: It made me a lot more productive in the long run.

Vim seems like the wrong example. A lot of people use it with just the defaults. Emacs seems to be customized right away by more people.

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

#23

I'm one of the few people who agree with you. I'll bet I can do most things in vim faster than intellicode or whatever the new hotness is.

Java in intellij+ideavim is much faster than in (n)vim, and that comes from someone who has been using vim for nearly a decade. Intellij is just too good.

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

#24
post #6
post #4

I like command-lines. I don't like TUIs. Here's the litmus test for whether a program truly belongs there: Would it shit the bed if its stdout was a printer?

So you edit with ed? :). Also anything wrapped inside tmux would definitely defecate if hooked up to printer. Some jobs are interactive. TUIs ain't bad for those.

That got to me brainstorming what someone might do if they were trying to write a modern line editor, targeting developers writing in... maybe not Java, but perhaps Go.

It doesn't seem like anyone has tried to build anything like that before. Most recent seems to be Rob Pike's sam from the 1980s, which (at one time in the 2000s at least) was the professed favored programming tool by Brian Kernighan and Bjarne Stroustrup.

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

#25
I am sure the author is a power user of his tools. I tried to use Vim for more than a simple text editor for few days. I realised that it would very hard to replicate the productivity of a special purpose IDE(IntelliJ in my case) using Vim. tmux is great but if you are used to multiple windows or tabs that is fine as well.

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

#26
I kind of wish this article was deeper on what benefits the OP was seeing from the plugins or what have you. I just was left hoping for something more from something that claimed to be a 'guide to the terminal' which usually is much more in depth to a particular workflow and you can usually glean one or two things you can add for yourself.

I'm from emacs land, and so generally using terminal over the emacs+GTK has a lot of limitations (ex: can't display or embed images, no drag and drop, copy and paste usually integrates better with the rest of the applications you are using when selecting regions of textual data). On top of that emacs comes with tiling for free where normally you would have to tmux+vim.

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

#27
post #2

> To avoid the annoying seconds in which vIM would freeze during tasks like syntax-checks, neovim lets you run jobs asynchronously. Vim 8 also has asynchronous tasks, as well as a builtin terminal emulator. So there is not much of a reason to use Neovim (except Lua scripts, maybe?).

It's faster, which I discovered after switching to it for Javascript/Typescript development. Also has better autocomplete plugins. Vim plugins just don't seem to have taken advantage of the async features yet.

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

#28
Not specifically related to the article but related to the theme of the article. I have a web-based dashboard that I created using a ruby gem called Dashing that was created by Shopify but since discontinued. I'd like to use a terminal based dashboard instead. Any suggestions?

I came across WTF but don't know Go or see any documentation about building custom modules.

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

#29

I'm one of the few people who agree with you. I'll bet I can do most things in vim faster than intellicode or whatever the new hotness is.

Java in intellij+ideavim is much faster than in (n)vim, and that comes from someone who has been using vim for nearly a decade. Intellij is just too good.

Been using Vim for about the same length of time... And the times I have used those emulators they just haven't been the same. Does the emulator support VimScript? Macros? Plugins? async jobs like vim8?

The terminal is my IDE I can open a file with a couple of keystrokes, run bash scripts from inside of my editor and just as easily be back navigating the terminal.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how intellij improves any of this stuff. I'd rather memorize compose-able bash commands, than intellij keystrokes.

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

#30

For me, things like VIM where you first have to configure the hell out of it are a pain. Every time you're on some other machine, all your customization is gone. So after switching machines a bazillion times over the years, making the same little tweaks over and over, I've learned to deal with the default config. What I didn't expect: It made me a lot more productive in the long run.

Why not just take your configuration with you? I switched machines multiple times and each time it took me just a few minutes to migrate my vim configuration over to the new one.

Especially since I have my vim configuration and other dotfiles in Git. Just git clone and I am done.

Off course that is too much when I am only using a machine temporarily (like servers over ssh), but I can be productive with the default as well. It is just that with my configured vim I am more productive.

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