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The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#41

Post by davidvarela_us »

speedgoose wrote: post #27
wildrhythms wrote: post #20

Honest question: Why is web development such a shitshow on Windows that that every single 'tutorial' like this doesn't even attempt to make it work, and instead just immediately directs Windows users to WSL?

Windows is not great for NodeJs based dev stacks, which are very common for web development these days. Because JavaScript developers tend to write their development tools in JavaScript. NodeJs is not great on windows because the packages/modules model uses many tiny files and the Windows filesystem, NTFS, is extremely slow for this kind of load. Another problem is compiling C/C++ NodeJS dependencies on windows. It’s…

No kidding. When I was heavily contributing to Julia's Pkg (which uses roughly the same model for modules as NPM, at least in terms of the file system), our test suite would run roughly an order of magnitude slower on Windows. This was very annoying on days where a lot of PRs where in the pipeline. I poked around the problem about for a while, and eventually came to the same conclusion (but I'm no Windows expert).

Eventually, I worked around the problem by using a caching system to avoid blowing up the filesystem. It was necessary at the time, but it never felt like a satisfying solution. I wonder if anyone has the knowledge to make native Windows go fast on e.g. a large number of sequential git clone operations.

Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#42

Post by acemarke »

elipsey wrote: post #6

I'm kind of trying to go the other way. I am amazed at how productive great front-end/js-first developers are with even just a browser console --- but I am totally flumoxed by this environment, and have trouble sinking my fingernails into the first ledge on that learning curve. Is there a "terminal developer's guide to front end"?

Yes. I wrote a blog series called "How Web Apps Work" that covers fundamental terms and concepts for web dev in general (HTTP, client dev workflow, HTML/DOM/CSS, JS, and data transfer), with some of that more focused on client-side concepts:

https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/series/how-web-apps-work

I've also got a set of slides on "JavaScript for Java Devs", which is a thorough cheat-sheet style overview of JS syntax, concepts, and ecosystem:

https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/05/presentation-js-fo...

and I helped put together a curated list of learning resources for JavaScript, TypeScript, React, and Redux over on the Reactiflux Discord site:

https://www.reactiflux.com/learning

Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#43

Post by reducesuffering »

elipsey wrote: post #6

I'm kind of trying to go the other way. I am amazed at how productive great front-end/js-first developers are with even just a browser console --- but I am totally flumoxed by this environment, and have trouble sinking my fingernails into the first ledge on that learning curve. Is there a "terminal developer's guide to front end"?

I'm a React / DevOps newbie and https://fullstackopen.com/en/about has been exceptional. Just need a little prerequisite HTML/JS knowledge, but even without I think a backend developer could grasp it with a little extra time.

Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#44

Post by elipsey »

acemarke wrote: post #42
elipsey wrote: post #6

I'm kind of trying to go the other way. I am amazed at how productive great front-end/js-first developers are with even just a browser console --- but I am totally flumoxed by this environment, and have trouble sinking my fingernails into the first ledge on that learning curve. Is there a "terminal developer's guide to front end"?

Yes. I wrote a blog series called "How Web Apps Work" that covers fundamental terms and concepts for web dev in general (HTTP, client dev workflow, HTML/DOM/CSS, JS, and data transfer), with some of that more focused on client-side concepts: https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/series/how-web-apps-work I've also got a set of slides on "JavaScript for Java Devs", which is a thorough cheat-sheet style overview of JS synta…

Thank you.

Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#45

Post by elipsey »

reducesuffering wrote: post #43
elipsey wrote: post #6

I'm kind of trying to go the other way. I am amazed at how productive great front-end/js-first developers are with even just a browser console --- but I am totally flumoxed by this environment, and have trouble sinking my fingernails into the first ledge on that learning curve. Is there a "terminal developer's guide to front end"?

I'm a React / DevOps newbie and https://fullstackopen.com/en/about has been exceptional. Just need a little prerequisite HTML/JS knowledge, but even without I think a backend developer could grasp it with a little extra time.

Thanks, perfect.

Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#46

Post by kingkongjaffa »

cercatrova wrote: post #39
pcthrowaway wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, please don't use the built-in terminal on macOS. Use iTerm.

That's true but it's another thing that beginners will have to install. It's better to let them use the basic tools first and then suggest iTerm afterwards, in my experience teaching others programming.

Honestly you can get iterm2, zsh and oh-my-zsh installed in like <10mins and have a great looking terminal that you never have to mess with again it’s not really a newbie overhead.

Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#47

Post by toastercat »

cercatrova wrote: post #34

God, please don't use Hyper, it's literally a terminal built with Electron, possibly the slowest practical way to implement a terminal. If you're on macOS or Linux, use the built in terminal. If you're on Windows, use Windows Terminal [0], the new one, not cmd prompt. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

Frontend Developers don't care about performance so long as it runs "good enough" on their M1 Macbooks.

Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#48

Post by toastercat »

speedgoose wrote: post #27
wildrhythms wrote: post #20

Honest question: Why is web development such a shitshow on Windows that that every single 'tutorial' like this doesn't even attempt to make it work, and instead just immediately directs Windows users to WSL?

Windows is not great for NodeJs based dev stacks, which are very common for web development these days. Because JavaScript developers tend to write their development tools in JavaScript. NodeJs is not great on windows because the packages/modules model uses many tiny files and the Windows filesystem, NTFS, is extremely slow for this kind of load. Another problem is compiling C/C++ NodeJS dependencies on windows. It’s…

I write Node natively on Windows all the time. You just have to pick your dependencies wisely, and things are usually safe.

Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#49

Post by qudat »

yewenjie wrote: post #4
frau_wacholder wrote: post #2

it's pretty crazy that this article only mention hyper or the built in vs code terminal as it's two recommendations, when excellent terminals like alacritty, kitty and terminator exist and aren't written in javascript

I have been enjoying Foot Terminal of late - minimal, fast, Wayland-first. Not sure about complete feature-parity, but I personally did not miss any feature of Alacritty. https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

Love foot, using it on my dev framework laptop running sway. Works great and don’t miss a single feature (except ligatures).

Re: The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal

#50

Post by speedgoose »

qsort wrote: post #32
speedgoose wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is not great for NodeJs based dev stacks, which are very common for web development these days. Because JavaScript developers tend to write their development tools in JavaScript. NodeJs is not great on windows because the packages/modules model uses many tiny files and the Windows filesystem, NTFS, is extremely slow for this kind of load. Another problem is compiling C/C++ NodeJS dependencies on windows. It’s…

Part of it is Windows being Windows, but part of it is languages/runtimes treating Windows as a second-class platform, which is understandable but a predictable source of problems. See e.g. Python, which runs just fine everywhere.

Python is slow everywhere.
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