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That's decidedly not true. Nor is this about customization of workflows. I am talking about actual unadulterated power to do things you cannot do in an IDE. All

That's decidedly not true. Nor is this about customization of workflows. I am talking about actual unadulterated power to do things you cannot do in an IDE. All IDEs optimize for the average use case. If they do expose a set of advanced commands or transformations, they are hidden deep in the menus and what you can do with them is extremely rigid and limited. At most you have a few dozen commands (you would call them menus) available. Compare that to couple of thousand commands available on the command line that do all sorts of things and that can be combined in useful, creative and often times unexpected ways. All that in addition to having a programmable command interpreter (i.e. the shell itself) that allows you to automated things you do often. Vim is often described as programming your text transformations, well command line is programming your workflow, but it is also more powerful because of the shear number of commands available.

toyg 11y ago
As parent said, good IDEs (like IDEA etc) can be customized to no end. You can remap pretty much all "menu" commands to shortcuts, and they have plenty of interfaces to extend their feature-set through plugins and custom commands to invoke the shell or what-have-you. Honestly, it's not a crime to like nice windows, y'know.
- super_mario 11y ago
  That's another misconception GUI people seem to have. You can have nice windows and color schemes in Terminal as well (even on Windows is you install MSYS2). Except you get absolute control over your windows layouts and behaviors with tmux and friends. And you don't have to reach for the mouse to interact with any of them.
  - toyg 11y ago
    Looking forward to drop shadows and brushed-metal in tmux, which you shall promptly post. Also fullscreen exposé-like dashboard with previews would be nice.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Like we don't have better things to use our processor cycles on :P. Also, I thought skeuomorphism was dead now?
      - cytzol 11y ago
        It doesn't necessarily have to be skeuomorphic, but I like to burn some processor cycles making different things look different, not necessarily brushed-metal attractive. So my todo-list files don't look like my source code files which don't look my terminal windows, which helps me tell what's what. (And it's beside the point, but brushed metal has been dead for years by now!)
    - super_mario 11y ago
      Funny enough, iTerm2 has expose for its tabs, but I never use it. It's just not how I work. Drop shadows are not needed, since in iTerm2 or tmux the entire active windows is brighter and all others become slightly greyed out, so you never confuse what has focus. Bushed metal on the other hand is not something I want or desire.
      - toyg 11y ago
        > It's just not how I work. ... which means nobody else needs it, right? :)
        super_mario 11y ago
        I never implied that everyone should use the command line or that GUIs are evil or bad. I was just answering the query "why people still use command lines" to the original post.
ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "That's decidedly not true. Nor is this about customization of workflows. I am talking about actual unadulterated power to do things you cannot do in an IDE. All IDEs optimize for the average use case. If they do expose a set of advanced commands or transformations, they are hidden deep in the menus and what you can do with them is extremely rigid and limited. At most you have a few dozen commands (you would call them menus) available." Something tells me instead of telling you what you can customise in good IDEs I should show you. With that in mind, tell me something I shouldn't be able to customise in Visual Studio and I'll show you how its done. To start this off, here's how to create custom keyboard shortcuts, as you can see it's very easy to do: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/blogs/tool-tracker/2012/07/create-keyboard-shortcuts.aspx https://visualstudiomagazine.com/blogs/tool-tracker/2012/07/...
- super_mario 11y ago
  You are assuming I never use any GUI tools or never try IDEs. I do. I know how customizable most of them are (all except XCode which is absolute garbage). And you can spend a lot of time doing that (writing your own extensions or invoking those external command line tools on your text selections etc), but why bother spending time on that when I can use those tools directly in the command line? And if I'm going to write an extension (that's already programming something) then I might as well do it in the command line, and use it anywhere I can edit text.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    Can you give me one example of a command line tool you wrote to help you get your work done?
    - super_mario 11y ago
      Just today I wrote a custom git command to help me sync my branch with master without having to first git checkout master, git pull, git checkout <my_branch>, git rebase master and deal with conflicts. I chose BASH for my language of choice, but could have use Python or Ruby or anything that the shell can execute.

toyg 11y ago

As parent said, good IDEs (like IDEA etc) can be customized to no end. You can remap pretty much all "menu" commands to shortcuts, and they have plenty of interfaces to extend their feature-set through plugins and custom commands to invoke the shell or what-have-you. Honestly, it's not a crime to like nice windows, y'know.

super_mario 11y ago
That's another misconception GUI people seem to have. You can have nice windows and color schemes in Terminal as well (even on Windows is you install MSYS2). Except you get absolute control over your windows layouts and behaviors with tmux and friends. And you don't have to reach for the mouse to interact with any of them.
- toyg 11y ago
  Looking forward to drop shadows and brushed-metal in tmux, which you shall promptly post. Also fullscreen exposé-like dashboard with previews would be nice.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Like we don't have better things to use our processor cycles on :P. Also, I thought skeuomorphism was dead now?
    - cytzol 11y ago
      It doesn't necessarily have to be skeuomorphic, but I like to burn some processor cycles making different things look different, not necessarily brushed-metal attractive. So my todo-list files don't look like my source code files which don't look my terminal windows, which helps me tell what's what. (And it's beside the point, but brushed metal has been dead for years by now!)
  - super_mario 11y ago
    Funny enough, iTerm2 has expose for its tabs, but I never use it. It's just not how I work. Drop shadows are not needed, since in iTerm2 or tmux the entire active windows is brighter and all others become slightly greyed out, so you never confuse what has focus. Bushed metal on the other hand is not something I want or desire.
    - toyg 11y ago
      > It's just not how I work. ... which means nobody else needs it, right? :)
      - super_mario 11y ago
        I never implied that everyone should use the command line or that GUIs are evil or bad. I was just answering the query "why people still use command lines" to the original post.

ZenoArrow 11y ago

> "That's decidedly not true. Nor is this about customization of workflows. I am talking about actual unadulterated power to do things you cannot do in an IDE. All IDEs optimize for the average use case. If they do expose a set of advanced commands or transformations, they are hidden deep in the menus and what you can do with them is extremely rigid and limited. At most you have a few dozen commands (you would call them menus) available." Something tells me instead of telling you what you can customise in good IDEs I should show you. With that in mind, tell me something I shouldn't be able to customise in Visual Studio and I'll show you how its done. To start this off, here's how to create custom keyboard shortcuts, as you can see it's very easy to do: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/blogs/tool-tracker/2012/07/create-keyboard-shortcuts.aspx https://visualstudiomagazine.com/blogs/tool-tracker/2012/07/...

super_mario 11y ago
You are assuming I never use any GUI tools or never try IDEs. I do. I know how customizable most of them are (all except XCode which is absolute garbage). And you can spend a lot of time doing that (writing your own extensions or invoking those external command line tools on your text selections etc), but why bother spending time on that when I can use those tools directly in the command line? And if I'm going to write an extension (that's already programming something) then I might as well do it in the command line, and use it anywhere I can edit text.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Can you give me one example of a command line tool you wrote to help you get your work done?
  - super_mario 11y ago
    Just today I wrote a custom git command to help me sync my branch with master without having to first git checkout master, git pull, git checkout <my_branch>, git rebase master and deal with conflicts. I chose BASH for my language of choice, but could have use Python or Ruby or anything that the shell can execute.