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IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

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Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#461
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just not read the rest of my post? We are not talking about DOS, we are talking about "modern" TUIs you would use on a modern Linux/Windows/MacOS system. I even made that explicit in my first paragraph.

I don't think others are talking about what you are angry about. I said that with the first reply and I'm not the only one saying it. Nobody is trying to take Zed or Neovim away from you. By the way one of the most frequent modern TUI apps that I use is Midnight Commander. It's a very nice app, which I use mostly when I SSH into a remote machine to manage it. Is there a 2D accelerated GUI that can help me do the same…

>Is there a 2D accelerated GUI that can help me do the same?

Of course. Just mount it through ssh and use whatever file manager you already have. It is very silly to switch tools just because the machine is somewhere else.

Switching tools just to accommodate the machine being remote is just bizarre to me. You even said that you used mc mostly for remote machines. What is the point of that? Now you have to use at least two tools which do the exact same thing, except you only use one when the system is remote? Does that not seem like a total waste? It would be one thing if you said that mc is what you always used, but that is not the case, you actively switch tools just to accommodate the machine being remote. Why? Do you think that is reasonable at all, when something as simple as just mounting over ssh exists?

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#462
It's funny that students in the early 90s would use a pirated copy of turbo C or pascal, but in the early 2000s when Java took over curriculums, students couldn't access a decent IDE. Many never saw a debugger in action, and executed javac in a dos window.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#463
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is magit much better than tig? I've never used magit.

If you’re still using tig, have a look at lazygit. Needs some getting used to (coming from tig) but supports way more git features.

Same, love lazygit. My only issue is that I find it too centered around qwerty keyboard... which is small.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

SSH comes to mind.

How so? I use remote machines all the time, why would I need a TUI for that? VSCode and zed support editing on remote machines and the machine drives are also mounted on the local machine? What purpose would any TUI have? What even are the potential benefits?

Right now I can use the exact same software I use on my local machine. Can you give me any reason why I should consider anything else?

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#465

It's funny that students in the early 90s would use a pirated copy of turbo C or pascal, but in the early 2000s when Java took over curriculums, students couldn't access a decent IDE. Many never saw a debugger in action, and executed javac in a dos window.

IntelliJ was already awesome in the early 2000s.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#466

It's funny that students in the early 90s would use a pirated copy of turbo C or pascal, but in the early 2000s when Java took over curriculums, students couldn't access a decent IDE. Many never saw a debugger in action, and executed javac in a dos window.

I recall using Eclipse 2.x in the mid 2000s and it was good, although not fast.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the late 90s I was required to slowly replace dumb terminals with PCs. One of the older ladies taking phone orders was most put out by this, understandably. She was lightning fast on that terminal. She'd never used a PC (I hit on the idea of using solitaire to learn to use a mouse, which worked amazingly well), and was never able to get to the same speed with one as she'd done on her dumb terminal. It's hard to be…

While I agree that dedicated devices can be more efficient than Windows-style user interfaces, and even more so than browser-based user interfaces, many people don't use those modern interfaces in efficient ways. I have observed countless times how many people fill in a field, than move their hand to the mouse to move the focus to the next field or button, than move their hand back to the keyboard, instead of just pr…

It's for this reason that I dream of us going back to keyboard-first HCI. I wish the underlying BIOS could easily boot and run multiple operating systems simultaneously and there were keys that were hardwired to the BIOS to switch out of whatever GUI crap you were in to the underlying "master control mode".

I wish we'd made better correspondence between the GUI and the keys on the keyboard. For example, the ESC should always be top-left of the keyboard and every dialog box should have an escape that basically always does the same thing (go back/cancel) and is wired to the hardware key. Instead of drop-down menus at the top of the screen, we could have had pop up menus at the bottom of the screen that positionally correspond to the F1-F12 keys.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don’t ‘git clone’ and ‘git commit’, or ‘mkdir’ and ‘grep’?

Not following you; how does that question relate?

All the keybindings you mentioned are commands accessible with M-x. The thing with Emacs is that a chord is always attached to a keymap. The global keymap is always accessible while all the others are accessible through a keybind in another keymap, recursively.

So the only thing you need to know are those commands. And that's the main appeal of Emacs, to have commands that augment text editing. One of the most powerful examples is org mode, which is just another markup language, but there's a lot of commands that makes it an organizer, a time tracker, an authoring platform, a code notebook.

Each mode is a layer of productivity you put on the bare editing experience.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#469
I had to use Borland when studying but never really liked it. Later I tried Notepad+ with console for the first time and everything clicked. There is a console for compiling and running and there is a text editor for editing. It was the flow that made sense.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#470
> Both Free Pascal and QB64 are maintained and under relatively-active development, with their most recent releases in 2021… but they are mostly ignored because they expose arcane languages that most people have no interest in these days.

Touché. Personally I think Pascal (the FPC/Lazarus variety) was pretty cool, straight up one of the best ways to easily do cross platform GUI apps, something of that old RAD fame: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php

I wish someone would prove me wrong, what are the best modern cross-platform options for native GUI?

At the same time, for everything else in similar circumstances (statically compiled executables, relatively safe to code and use), Go has replaced it for me, in great part due to both the ergonomics of the language, but also just how batteries included the standard library is.

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