Command-line interface can indeed be very convenient for many tasks, nevertheless a properly designed GUI can always be made a way better than a TUI so I can see no reason to stick with terminal-based editors given a choice. And I wish people would stop dichotomizing command-line and GUI and start integrating their capabilities to build something synergic. I.e. I'd love to have a terminal featuring powerful inteligent pop-up autocompletion and correction, visual shell command construction assistance, file choice dialogue (so I could choose a file the GUI way and get its name pasted into the command) etc.
Terminals Are Sexy
71–80 of 84 posts
Re: Terminals Are Sexy
#72It mentions TotalTerminal, which hasn't been properly supported since OS X 10.10, and outright doesn't work on versions of macOS newer than 10.12. I really miss TotalTerminal. I've been forced to switch to iTerm, the only other way I can find to get a hotkey terminal, but it's an extremely noticeable difference to switch from the overall fastest terminal to the overall slowest: https://danluu.com/term-latency/
Interesting read, never considered iTerm to be slow and I'm so grateful it exists but maybe I'm not as hardcore a terminal user as I thought I was :).
I'm not sure this is still the case or has been for some time. The maintainer of iTerm2 commented on it here https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/5922 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14800195.
Also recent versions include a metal renderer[3] (not sure if it's enabled by default) which might be even faster, I have been running it for some time but have not noticed much difference.
Another reason why it might be hard to notice is also because when one is using ssh you anyways have the network latency so might be one is simply trained not to react to latency in terminals as much.
Re: Terminals Are Sexy
#73Re: Terminals Are Sexy
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting read, never considered iTerm to be slow and I'm so grateful it exists but maybe I'm not as hardcore a terminal user as I thought I was :).
I'm not sure this is still the case or has been for some time. The maintainer of iTerm2 commented on it here https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/5922 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14800195 . Also recent versions include a metal renderer[3] (not sure if it's enabled by default) which might be even faster, I have been running it for some time but have not noticed much difference. Another reason wh…
For me, the most noticeable delay is in opening the hotkey window. I have animation disabled, and there's still a few hundred milliseconds between when I press the hotkey, and when iTerm appears.
Re: Terminals Are Sexy
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also useful for people who do have root access to a terminal, remote or otherwise, but want more up-to-date packages. Some packages (my favorite example is youtube-dl) are useless if they're not up-to-date. And sometimes the new version has a feature that's really important to you. I'm using it for ripgrep and node, for instance. ripgrep isn't available in apt, and the node version in apt is incredibly outdated.…
and that's because distro package managers never have the latest version. I am using Arch - seems pretty up to date: [gerdesj@jglaptop ~]$ aurman -Ss ripgrep community/ripgrep 0.10.0-2 A search tool that combines the usability of ag with the raw speed of grep Thanks for the heads up wrt search tools.
Oh, yeah, I don't personally use Arch, but from what I hear, it isn't an Arch problem at all. I was mostly talking about apt (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc) and yum (Fedora, CentOS, etc).
Re: Terminals Are Sexy
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea but it's written in JavaScript.
And has 51 dependencies. Some of this JavaScript stuff is amazingly ridiculous.
npm itself has more dependencies.
Re: Terminals Are Sexy
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neat! That could be useful in certain situations. In case you're suggesting Linuxbrew is unnecessary (I don't think you are, but just in case), there's definitely something way more convenient about just using Linuxbrew to install everything, than to track down what software is best installed from what repository.
Out of curiosity, for how long have you been using Linux as a daily driver?
I use macOS as my daily driver. I've been using CentOS and Ubuntu Server to run my webservers for around twelve years now, which includes a top-1000 website in the US.
I used to manually compile things like Node.js and ripgrep from source to get up-to-date versions, but these days I just use Linuxbrew.
Re: Terminals Are Sexy
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting read, never considered iTerm to be slow and I'm so grateful it exists but maybe I'm not as hardcore a terminal user as I thought I was :).
I'm not sure this is still the case or has been for some time. The maintainer of iTerm2 commented on it here https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/5922 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14800195 . Also recent versions include a metal renderer[3] (not sure if it's enabled by default) which might be even faster, I have been running it for some time but have not noticed much difference. Another reason wh…
Haha good call! I might well have trained myself to ignore a small latency :D
Re: Terminals Are Sexy
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linuxbrew, like Homebrew, is useful for non-invasive non-system/infrastructure packages. Compared to system package managers, it is (arguably) simpler to use and contribute to, and often has more up-to-date packages (especially compared to e.g. RHEL) because it tries to solve a much simpler problem. I think there is room for a package manager that focuses more on managing your user-specific CLI tools than your system…
The “benefits” you are listing for Homebrew are interesting, because you can also look at them as disadvantages: > it is (arguably) simpler to use and contribute to, and often has more up-to-date packages (especially compared to e.g. RHEL) because it tries to solve a much simpler problem. Unfortunately, this often means it breaks or doesn’t do certain things…doing something simple like getting an old version of a pac…
I think the latter restriction is because multi-user macOS are rare. Linuxbrew is very much oriented towards non-root uses and works quite well on a multi-user system. In fact, unprivileged use on multi-user systems is the main reason I think Linuxbrew is useful.
I agree that Homebrew very aggressively focuses only on the common case (newest version, few/no options). I think it's the right choice, as Homebrew is never the only way to install something. It would be bad if RPM had made the same design tradeoff, though.
Re: Terminals Are Sexy
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But most commandline languages are inconsistent, have inconsistent abbreviations, have inconsistent command parameter naming/defaults, contain acronyms of incomprehensible words, have plain weird names, contain inconsistent or outright incorrect documentation... And how is this different for GUIs? Location / icons / description / ... depends entirely on the application. Some will have hotkey handles, some won't. Sa…
With a language, it is far more important. In a gui I can just click around and see. With tuis, I need to enter a command and hope it is the right syntax.
IDK about you, but I find it writing a command and seeing the result is far, far faster than clicking around.
I would spend far less time at my computer (would only use it for work) if it only had a CLI, but I would never, never use a GUI (beyond text editors, of course) for most of the grunt work, the CLI is simply faster and, and this is the most important issue, almost everything you do with it can be automated.
I couldn't even begin to imagine having to navigate the endless dialogues in IDEs to configure every little thing I would do in the command line, I'd give up programming altogether.