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Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

186 points by wyclif 9y ago

cellover 9y ago
i3wm has been a huge productivity boost for me as a development machine at home for the following reasons: - no distractions - minimalism, most navigation on the keyboard - easy to setup a startup script that preloads your default screens / workspaces / apps setup - easy to map your workspaces in your mind From machine boot to coding: 30 seconds. https://twitter.com/Phonosheet/status/952179820447911936 https://twitter.com/Phonosheet/status/952179820447911936
- overcast 9y ago
  I've been experimenting with moving my "getting work done" setup over to an old laptop running just Mint Linux for that exact reasoning. I end up getting so distracted on my MacPro desktop, because it's got everything on there. Movies/Games/Messaging/Email etc. I need just a distraction free environment that still allows me to do web development.
  - thurt 9y ago
    Instead of mint, if you are doing a new install and looking for a minimalist approach with i3, consider wattOS distro microwatt edition. I found it on distrowatch; I installed it about 6 months ago on an old laptop and I'm pretty happy with it.
    - overcast 9y ago
      Thanks for the response, is that based on debian/ubuntu? I need to have that environment to mirror production environments.
      - avhon1 9y ago
        Yes. http://planetwatt.com/new/index.php/about/ http://planetwatt.com/new/index.php/about/ "wattOS is a lightweight Linux operating system remastered from the core Ubuntu Linux build."
        cellover 9y ago
        I did not know the existence of this distribution, thanks i'll look into it.
- lprd 9y ago
  Is there an equivilent to i3 in the mac ecosystem? I currently use iTerm with tmux... so would using a window manager, on top of all that, be overkill?
  - cesnja 9y ago
    I used Amethyst and KWM in the past, but ultimately settled on Spectacleapp, which is great for basic window management. Sadly, neither of them can really compare with i3wm when you take into account the tabbed mode and easy window splitting.
- flukus 9y ago
  I finally got around to trying i3 a few weeks ago and I wish I'd done it a lot sooner. I installed it on my fairly crap dell laptop that can barely run windows 10 (windows in unusable on spinning disks) and it flies, everything is instant, alt+enter and the new terminal is just there, alt+d and the searchable program menu appears (windows could take several seconds to a minute), alt+3 and I'm on different virtual screen. The only time I find myself waiting for anything at all is a new browser window or the funky lock screen installed but I'm pretty sure both of those are solvable. The interface is fantastic, it's the first WM I've used (apart from maybe tmux or vim) that actually manages my windows well. In hindsight the desktop metaphor is such and obviously dead end that we've wasted for too much time on. It will take some retraining, but even things like tabs in the web browser no longer feel necessary, the WM can handle this and give a consistent global interface. MS is kind of heading in this direction too: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709190/microsoft-windows-10-tabs-file-explorer-sets-feature https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709190/microsoft-windo... . I started off with the manjaro distro (https://manjaro.org/category/community-editions/i3/ https://manjaro.org/category/community-editions/i3/), it's got a fair bit of bling that you won't get by default elsewhere but the performance is great.
b0rsuk 9y ago
I thought I was alone. Every one of us minimalists draws the line somewhere else. I like vim, Python, Rust, RSS, web of documents rather than web of applications, static blog generators, roguelike games, symbols and symbolic graphics in computer games and boardgames. I prefer Ultima IV graphics to Ultima V graphics , because the latter started drawing individual torches, chairs, dishes, bushes, etc. I'm not anti-modern. I just have an eclectic taste. I pick what I consider the best of various areas. I dislike most social media. I would like Twitter if it wasn't overrun by bots. I have a phone I can throw and break a window with, in fact I fell on it from my bike and it's still okay, but my clavicle broke. When people are starting at their smartphones I either look around (in a bus etc), at other people, through window, or read a book. I'm saving for an E-ink device, it's too bead the technology stagnated because of tablets and smartphones. I hate being labeled a luddite or cranky because I don't sheepishly run into every innovation. Not all change is progress.
- dmos62 9y ago
  It's pleasant to know you're not alone. Same here: cli, tmux, vim, rust, lisps, unix way of system development, webapp allergy, gopher > web, irc, dumb phone, eink reader that lasts months. I'm not anti-modern either, but it's hard to pinpoint what makes me choose differently than many others. Here's two relevant outlooks I hold, but I'd say that they are insufficient to explain this behaviour. Trend following has no value, unless to fool someone. Solution's popularity does not imply that it is better.
  - bythckr 9y ago
    is Gopher still around?
- cjf4 9y ago
  Parklife!
- swozey 9y ago
  > I'm saving for an E-ink device, it's too bead the technology stagnated because of tablets and smartphones. While I'm one who thinks there's always room for improvement, I've owned about 5-6 various Kindles and if you're interested in having hundreds of books on one portable device you should just grab one. I've got the 1st (I believe) Paperwhite and it's all I need. I've looked at the newer Paperwhite and the Oasis but I just don't need the improvements they offer. Any paperwhite is fantastic. The reason I did upgrade to the paperwhite from whatever Kindle I had prior was the backlight was an absolute revolution. I used to have a battery powered light I had to stick on my previous kindle. The $80 for a Paperwhite is a great deal for what you get. I have 0 complaints. It could be a little faster and I prefer buying books on Amazon from my phone or laptop (edit: and not through the Kindle directly) then reading them on the Kindle but it's not a show stopper at all. Also, word of advice, if you're into Audible you can often find better deals by buying the Kindle version w/ Whispersync. I've almost bought $15-20 audible books before then saw that the kindle book was $7 and after that purchase the audiobook would be $3-5. It's not always the case but I can frequently find good deals on buying both.
na85 9y ago
Interesting read, but ultimately I was left confused as to the purpose of the article. As far as I can tell it was to express the author's disdain for the modern web stack (an embarrassment for web devs, to be sure) and to advocate using vim (yawn).
- coldtea 9y ago
  >As far as I can tell it was to express the author's disdain for the modern web stack It goes into way more than that. If by "purpose" you mean "what I get out of this", then not much. It's a rant, not some tutorial.
- wyclif 9y ago
  While I'd heard about Plan 9 and acme from following Rob Pike's work, I didn't know about acme-colors and that it takes a different approach than the typical syntax-highlighting theme. I found it interesting enough to experiment with.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  I think I mainly understand the point author tries to make: for example, it takes time to learn all of the shirtcuts in any GUI application (let's say, Slack) and become a power-user in it; so why not have a proper console interface if it's the same case for pushing buttons? Nevertheless Slack still manages to do it badly: Cmd+Shift+K takes 3 seconds to load the list of channels for a quick jump. How's that considered usable? It's something I generally miss: the ability to do actions using the keyboard. I think IDEA did it relatively well: their double-shift "Search everywhere" window works both fast and literally searches everything, providing something quite familiar to the console.
  - suprfnk 9y ago
    > it takes time to learn all of the shirtcuts in any GUI application I'd say in most cases it takes more time to learn a console application. GUI's these days are, mostly, pretty intuitive. CLI applications are not intuitive at all. The difference is, for me, that GUI use quickly levels out in efficiency. _If_ I have learned the CLI commands and know them well, I generally can do tasks a whole lot quicker than a GUI I know well. It just has a higher up-front cost, which may be very worth it, to not worth it at all, depending on how much you use the application.
sheraz 9y ago
I think the author echos some things I've been feeling about my work environment (the desktop). There is a lot of friction that comes when each of my applications wants to be its own immersive experience. My take-away from his post is that he seems to be iterating away from those rich, colorful, and distracting interfaces to something that is kind of interface-less. This, too, is my dream (or sorts). - Spotify without the spotify interface. (Google Music, in his case) - Slack without the slack interface (IRC, I guess) - Email without the web-client or sluggish Apple mail interface. I know there are CLI for each of those use cases. But it takes commitment to learn and get them working to your liking.
- cmiles74 9y ago
  I think I'd go a little further, even: not only is there friction moving from one "immersive" application to another, there seems to be some expenditure of energy necessary to actually make the switch. Each fights in it's own way, not only to deliver on it's function but to somehow tempt you into spending ever more time with that particular application. A console or text-based interface seems like a big equalizer; for sure it's often easier to manage a console application but it puts hard limits on how much attention these applications may siphon away. Perhaps it's easier for my attention to wander than others, but when the task at hand is particularly boring or unpleasant, I find I can waste quite a lot of time browsing through music or "catching up" on likely useless Slack conversations. Since I've moved them to a text-based interface, I do feel I am wasting time like this far less often.
  - SanderSantema 9y ago
    This is exactly the reason why I've tried to port as much stuff as I can to my terminal. Productivity in the sense of using a program faster is a nice by-product, but preserving my attention is way more important to me. To me it seems nowadays you don't pay hard cash for things online, you pay in attention. I'm trying to get my digital experience to serve me again instead of me serving to something which I'm using. On a sidenote: Any tips on making my digital experience less attention focused? For instance I would really like to use surf or uzbl but they don't have support for MacOS and I would still need an adblocker/ reader mode.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
I do this with emacs .
microcolonel 9y ago
I've been running basically the same stuff for the last six years. I have a somewhat modified fork of dwm, a lightly modified version of Termite (simplest working VTE3 terminal I could find), and my emacs (which has had basically the same configuration for the last four years). Most things take up the whole screen or the left or right division of it. I run the same thing on my high memory Xeon workstation that I do on my repurposed Chromebook and my OpenBSD ThinkPad. I can't really do anything about employer mandated Slack, but most corporate or hosted email is accessible through IMAPS and SMTP. Can't do much about Spotify, but I don't use that while working anyway, I tend to buy music files if it's convenient to do so, and I play those in cmus.
- nextos 9y ago
  Do you prefer VTE3-based terminals to urxvt?
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Yeah, I need iBus support for Japanese and Cyrillic input, and VTE3 interacts very well with input methods. I also find that VTE3 has the most legible (antialiased) text rendering and spacing/geometry of all the terminal emulators I've tried on Linux or OS X, especially when compared at smaller text sizes (7pt, for me). The default keyboard shortcuts are also pretty great in standard VTE3 terminals like Termite and GNOME Terminal (Ctrl + Shift + V for paste, Ctrl + Shift + C for copy), though that isn't specified by VTE3 itself. Rectangular selection works better in VTE3 than in URXVT or XTerm.
    - nextos 9y ago
      It looks nice, however there's no support for standard readline bindings?
- Ascetik 9y ago
  Clementine is the simplist Spotify replacement application I could find to avoid using their clunky app.
mbrock 9y ago
The way I see it, my whole computing environment is necessarily a kind of place. Emacs happens to be a really good one. So, I use Emacs as a window manager. My computer boots into a full screen Emacs, so I don't think of it as opening Emacs — I think of my computer as an Emacs-based thing, which in turn contains a bunch of other tools (like M-x shell for running shell commands). The way the author uses xterm with tmux and Vim, I use Emacs instead. My environment has a large font and no syntax highlighting. I find that language mode regexps so often get confused that they're more annoying than convenient. I would really, really like to try working with an e-ink monitor. Slow latency and monochrome would be a benefit as far as I'm concerned.
- tomsmeding 9y ago
  > I find that language mode regexps so often get confused that they're more annoying than convenient. For what language modes do you have that experience? I haven't used emacs myself much, but in other editors, most syntax highlighting descriptions are pretty good. The only exception to this rule is highlighting Haskell, which is apparently a monstrous challenge that no-one can even do remotely well.
  - mbrock 9y ago
    It's really, really hard to make a completely correct mode based on regexes—just consider the challenge of writing a regex that correctly highlights the syntax of regex itself, which you need for JavaScript, Ruby, and lots of other languages. Heredocs in shell, metaprogramming tricks in Ruby, reader extensions in Lisp, nested quotes, etc etc etc—I might be weird, but I feel like I run into these edge cases a lot, when editors think my parens are unbalanced when they're actually not, and so on. Auto-indentation rarely formats things the way I want, too, and I very rarely need anything more advanced than shifting blocks in and out. I also just find it a bit strange that we have culturally started to believe that editing code is nearly unthinkable without different colors everywhere!
    - tomsmeding 9y ago
      I completely agree that highlighting code with regexps is almost useless, but if emacs is not capable of doing more than that (or its language modes usually do not do more than that), I think that emacs is at fault here, not syntax highlighting. In sublime text, for example, the syntax definitions are basically stack machines (if I'm not mistaken), and can therefore parse any context-free grammar. This is clearly powerful enough to handle all the edge cases you mention.
patrickmay 9y ago
"There’s a way in which you could say that Emacs is a place whereas vi is a tool." As an Emacs user, I agree with this. The author's preference for more tools and fewer immersive applications still resonates with me because I see Emacs as a place for all the tools I need for development and writing.
- nextos 9y ago
  That's true. Emacs is a platform, a virtual Lisp machine. The Web is another platform. Plus our OS plumbing, usually Unix. Understanding my computer this way has brought me a lot of sanity. I only use a tiling window manager (xmonad), Emacs, a browser (firefox) and a Unix terminal (urxvt). Previously I was trying to move most of my computing into pure Unix CLI. While it was fast and simple, I found most ncurses applications (e.g. mutt, remind, irssi) do not really compose as well as simple Unix programs do (e.g. wc, grep, xargs). Moving everything to elisp packages instead (e.g. org, notmuch, magit), where all elisp nicely blends together has been a great improvement. Plus dealing with configuration in a functional way, by switching to NixOS.
- dleslie 9y ago
  Indeed; Emacs is a place that I take with me wherever I go, because it adapts to wherever I put it with little to no configuration on my part. My tools come with me wherever I go, not unlike a travelling caravan.
bprasanna 9y ago
Can someone please identify the font used in code snippet (image)?
- rwnspace 9y ago
  https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ To do this: ctrl+U (in FF) -> look for css link at top of html -> look for font names near top of css.
  - bprasanna 9y ago
    Thanks a ton!
- ilconsigliere 9y ago
  It's Computer Modern, from LaTeX. He mentions it in the article. The css trick mentioned in the other comment doesn't work for fonts in images.
foxhop 9y ago
> There’s a way in which you could say that Emacs is a place whereas vi is a tool. This really resonates with me, and I have to say I agree. I try to treat my browser as a tool, it holds state only for as long as it's open. I pretend that at any time the browser (or computer) could crash and I would loose my place. I use my web browser (I switched back to Firefox from many years with Chrome) very similar to how I use my email inbox. For email this is "inbox zero". If I need to reread an email, respond, or do something with a message, I mark it as unread. Unread stuff gets cleared at least once a day (often more now that I have a smart phone). I open my email and work it down to zero (or as close as I can) and then I close it. Email acts as a tool, a communication / todo list, hybrid. An unread email is the same as an open browser tab, it symbolizes work-in-progress. With my web broswer, I open it as needed and open as many tabs or even windows as I need. When a tab, window, or page is no longer needed, I close it. To "save" a page I create a bookmark (but I can't tell you the last time I've actually used bookmarks to find something). Another way I "save" is when I'm tearing down my web browser, I pull a page's tab out into it's own window. This marks it as "unread"; I need to do something with it. This process doesn't really save the page, it just allows me to clear out the other tabs and context out of my head. It helps me focus, and reminds me to just do that task on the single tab instead of letting it linger. I close my web browser multiple times a day. I follow this practice with my terminal windows as well.
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  To easily emulate this sort of browser behavior, just use it in Porn Mode (Privacy Mode).
sk1pper 9y ago
To me, true minimalism on my desktop came from stopping messing around with different window managers, IDEs, whatever to try to maximize my experience. Specifically, command line interfaces to Slack and GPM just add more headache and frustration. My setup: a terminal with tmux; Firefox; Spotify. (Recently switched from GPM, would recommend). Stock everything except dark themes on some stuff and caps lock->ctrl. I don’t have some super-enlightened workflow where everything is in terminal or has keybinds or something. But more importantly, I’m not continually wasting time on changing my env and adding complexity.
- staplers 9y ago
  Try Spotify in Firefox. Even simpler.
  - endisukaj 9y ago
    And enable DRM in my web browser? No thank you.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Which is it CLI or GUI is better for you its not clear and for an experienced developer often CLI is better than GUI a shell to MySQL is better that the abomination that is PHPMYSQL.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Really saying that a CLI to a RDBMS is better than a GUI (PHPMYADMIN) there must be more script kiddies on hn than I thought
    - sweeneyrod 9y ago
      No, just a lot of people who like punctuation.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Learning to stop spending so much time customizing everything and work with the defaults was one of the hardest but most productive lessons I’ve learned over the years. I used to have a custom bashrc and custom vim and everything on my phone was custom and I put a lot of effort into it. I even found the perfect keyboard layout for me and switched my keyboards to that. To the point where I couldn’t effectively use someone else’s machine. And then I became a consultant and was logging into someone else’s machine every day, often when I couldn’t install any customizations at all. I learned to love bash as-is, and vim as-is. And my custom launcher stopped working, so I switched back to the default Android launcher. And then my work gave me an iPhone that I couldn’t customize. And suddenly I was spending more time working and less time customizing and my productivity shot through the roof. All I had to do was stop seeking things to make me work better and actually just start working. And in addition to higher productivity, I now had more free time in the day because my work got done faster. It really is freeing in a Zen-like fashion to just use a tool as-is and not constantly wonder how you could make it 5% better or 3% faster.
kenbolton 9y ago
I've been fantasizing recently about using a Bluetooth keyboard (Twiddler3) connected to an eInk reader to do most of my work both locally and on remote machines/instances. The eInk reader would have just enough power to run spacemacs. I can currently do this on an Android smartphone, but the experience is lacking because of the screen-size.
- sleepybrett 9y ago
  I already have enough frustration using an eink screen for reading books around the refresh rate of updating that page that I couldn't even imagine the pain of trying to use one interactively.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Imagine then what life was like when an editor meant a line editor and output universally referred to stacks of fan-fold green and white lined paper. The 'refresh rate' of a line editor would be a couple of seconds at best and to do an edit-compile-test cycle would be on the order of a couple of hours, two per day if you are lucky, but most likely only one per day.
- KG_5 9y ago
  Well look at this: https://hackaday.com/2018/01/15/this-portable-pi-may-not-be-what-you-expect/ https://hackaday.com/2018/01/15/this-portable-pi-may-not-be-...
TeddyDD 9y ago
It seems I'm heading in similar direction as author of the post. I switched from Gnome to i3 (I don't even have display manager installed), from Nautilius to ranger and then to [lf](https://github.com/gokcehan/lf https://github.com/gokcehan/lf). I use a lot of CLI tools like weechat. I'v been using Emacs for few months but now I prefer Kakoune - it's easier to customize. My [website](https://www.teddydd.me/ https://www.teddydd.me/) is pure html+css brutalism without single line of JavaScript... I just feel tired of huge, complicated software that requires big time investment to customize. I want things to be simple and modular. My setup is not beautiful, might have fewer features than full DE, but it's ergonomic and I understand what all my configs do.
munificent 9y ago
Does anyone else remember the WinAmp era of music software? There was a time when basically every app for playing music on your computer lived inside a little floating window that you carried with you to all of the other apps you were using at the time. That really did help me think of my music player as a tool and not a place. Though the little scrolling text could be distracting sometimes, I do occasionally find myself missing that style of interface.
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  Hahaha I was going to post that one, I just wanted to read other replies first. My WinAmp substitute is Audacious. It plays music, has repeat, shuffle, playlists, and little more. I tried to use Amarok to see what the fuss is about and was repulsed. It's not an audio player, it's an unfocused sound-related system thingy.
- lostconfused 9y ago
  Pretty sure Foobar2000 is still the most common go to audio playback software for audiophiles and enthusiasts.
- blunte 9y ago
  This is perhaps the opposite of minimalism, but I miss the days of Winamp and really awesome visualizations. When Winamp fell away, iTunes and the rest just never bothered to make many entertaining visualizations. It's too bad - some of the wa visualizers were so entrancing that it really did enhance the "listening" experience.
- romwell 9y ago
  Well, I've never had a single reason for abandoning WinAmp for playing music that lives on my hard drive - so yes, I do remember. WinAmp is a tool, and it still works. If you aren't using it, perhaps you actually want a place instead of a tool?
  - munificent 9y ago
    I do still want a tool, but I no longer maintain a local corpus of music files. I prefer streaming services these days.
ssivark 9y ago
> Every change I’ve made in my working environment over the past year or so has also been a lessening of immersiveness. My interfaces have become less rich, less colorful, less dynamic. I really like the author's place -vs- tool metaphor to contrast wannabe immersive experiences with tools that stay out of your way. I don't think it makes sense to avoid having places you go to (where you feel "at home") -- I mean that very generally, but even in the specific case of computing, your goto places might be your favorite browser, the command line, the unix system, Emacs, your IDE etc. A place where you feel at home, at control, with a sense of the multitude of possibilities lying ahead, and still in the driver's seat. The important requirement then is that the environment shouldn't try to nudge you around (especially towards misaligned goals). This is where most web/software platforms of today come up short, IMHO. This metaphor is also the best elucidation of Alan Kay's pithy quote (reproduced approximately): To me, a computer is worth more than my car, because of all the things it enables me to do. Most people, however, pay about as much for a computer, as they pay for a TV, and use it in roughly the same way.
- qznc 9y ago
  I also like the distinction of “tool” and “place”. It feels like a useful mental concept. I can see a relation to the economics of software development. Companies want their products to be places, so they capture a slice of your attention and deepen awareness of their brand. Nvidia is an example: It is just a single part of the computer hardware, yet it comes with a GUI tool and often demands attention. Free software can afford to become a tool. Imagine if you boot a Linux desktop and various involved projects show you a series of splash screens first: This desktop experience brought to you by systemd, dbus, dnsmasq, CUPS, NetworkManager, PulseAudio, Gnome, Mozilla Firefox, Gnome Keyring Daemon, gvfsd, and bash.
alfonsodev 9y ago
related, "Optimal colors to improve readability for people with dyslexia" [1] [1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/r11 https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/r11
totalperspectiv 9y ago
Is there an Acme / Plan 9 theme for Sublime? Initial Googlings don't show anything.
b0rsuk 9y ago
I like various discussion forums and talking to people online (often on IRC - when I'm programming). I like exchange of ideas, even arguing - as long as it remains respectful. I consider message boards / forums bloated and clunky. I miss usenet and threaded discussion. Disqus technically does that, but it takes what, 20 seconds to load ? And after recent acquisition it's only going to get worse. I think threaded discussion is much more like natural human conversation than "topics" on message boards. That's shoe-horning discussion. They invariably get off topic sooner or later, and moderators pride themselves on deleting posts that stray too far. It boggles my mind why topic-based message boards remain popular.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Maybe Talkyard is a bit different? It's new forum software, threaded, inspired by Hacker News: https://www.talkyard.io https://www.talkyard.io. (I'm developing it) With improvements over HN: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... Hmm I think threaded discussions, make the more sense, the more people join the discussion. If 999 people talk about something, they're going to split up into smaller groups, each group talking about a sub topic = thread. And everything laid out in a flat way = a huge mess. But if just 5 people talk about something — then they can stay focused on the same thing all of them. Flat = more ok.
  - RealityVoid 9y ago
    I think that is a pretty cool project there. I like it but I don't know, do you get many people using it? I think there are quite a bit of forum platforms out there.
    - KajMagnus 9y ago
      > do you get many people using it? No not yet. So far I've been focused on coding though (and I've learned that's the wrong way to get things done, I should instead start with validating the idea). But now a MVP is finished, and I'm shifting focus to marketing & PR. And one of the first steps, is ... to rename the project from EffectiveDiscussions to Talkyard. That's what I've been doing the past week, and ... the plan thereafter is to focus a bit on embedded comments for static site generators. There seems to be a slight vacuum here; Disqus isn't so popular any longer, it seems to me, among tech people = those who use static generators. > there are quite a bit of forum platforms out there Yes that's a problem for me. When I started this, in year 2010, there weren't. But I spent many years doing the wrong things, getting a job again & doing this on the spare time only ... and now suddenly there's Discourse, Flarum, Slack, Mattermost, Rocket Chat, Spot.IM, Discord, Matrix, and others. Maybe I was too slow. On the other hand, Talkyard is the only project with HackerNews topic types + chat features combined, so maybe it can find its niche.
bitwize 9y ago
Emacs is sort of a weird beast -- simultaneously tool and workbench. It can be infinitely shaped to fit the task at hand -- while it is in use -- but it integrates relatively smoothly with all the other tools available in a modern Unix environment, allowing those tools to extend the reach of Emacs without becoming part of it. But really, I -- and everybody else -- should really just use an IDE. For OO languages you need to have intelligent refactoring (and IntelliSense) and so you need to have an IDE. Refactoring tools are to programming what nondestructive editing is to image editing: a total paradigm shift in workflow that no one these days can live without. It takes a lot of effort to extend Emacs to understand the target language well enough to support these features (and it won't be done in elisp).
nwah1 9y ago
There's a lot of arguments that various people make regarding the supposed superiority of different setups. 1) It is claimed that using keyboard-only controls reduces "context switching." 2) It is claimed that tiling window managers are simpler and more logical, because you use more of the screen real estate and keep everything open all the time. 3) It is claimed that vim and emacs are better because the brief keyboard commands allow for amazing power with few keystrokes. Alas, these are almost all arguments voiced by people who grew up with technologies built around severely limited hardware constraints. GUIs were terrible for the longest time, and ten or twenty years ago you certainly couldn't get acceptable performance on them when working remotely. There are very good reasons why people would avoid all of these tools. Hardware is much better. Compositing window managers are much better. It is particularly understandable that people avoid vim and emacs. And there's really no empirical evidence at all that they save time, improve accuracy, or anything else. And any empirical studies on this question would have difficulty isolating the variables. People who do understand systems at the low level, and with all the historical context, could very well be better programmers in some ways... but not because of their environment. Thinking you could become like Richard Stallman by using emacs is cargo cult reasoning.
YuukiRey 9y ago
Funny because I just went the other way. I was running Arch/i3 on a Lenovo W530 I had for work. At some point I couldn't take it anymore. I wanted to use my headsets over bluetooth. I wanted to have no issues with monitor DPI and scaling and the dreaded optimus Nvidia technology. I don't want to have to think about which port I use to connect to an external monitor. I want Wifi to be a solved problem. Boot the laptop, choose the network, enter password, done. I want good battery life and the most basic compositing features enabled. In hindsight it's crazy that I'd fiddle with WM_STATE_SOMETHING in compton so that X has shadow but Y doesn't if they overlap with transparency (or something like that). My dunst notifications looked very aesthetically pleasing but... so do countless default notifications on mainstream distros. Yes, the whole mopidy/mcp/whatever looks really rad, especially if a program uses vi(m) keyboard shortcuts, but my music player really isn't something I want to think about and learn. Playing music isn't such an integral part of my work day that I need to make it more efficient. I am now using a MacBook Pro at work and on my desktop at home I use Antergos with Gnome. The latter is perfect as it gives me up-to-date packages and easy access to the AUR, while still coming with the bells and whistles of Gnome. I am also not sure if tiling windows really improve your productivity. I would say that most people would be better of having their apps on full-screen, to minimize distractions, instead of having all sorts of windows side-by-side. Ultimately I nowadays resonate more with what some other posts have mentioned: pick a platform and programs with sane defaults and only deviate from them if it's really worth it. If your job requires you to look at several terminals at the same time constantly and things like terminator/tmux/gnome-terminal don't do it, then sure, look into i3 (herbstluftwm/[insert flavor of the month]). Anything else I would now consider premature optimization.
Pete_D 9y ago
Emacs doesn't feel like either a tool or a place to me. If you use emacsdaemon and emacsclient, it becomes not a fixed place you work in, or a completely static tool, but something like a part of the ether you can draw from when needed. There's background state, but much less of the spatial/navigational burdens the author talks about. It's interesting they go on to mention mpd. I'm not just saying this just to nitpick - I think the stateful daemon concept is a useful extension to the place/tool metaphor and might be a way to achieve the author's desired web browsing experience. For example, what if web browsers could move tabs to a sort of "invisible window", and there was some shell command like "recall-tab Hacker News" which foregrounded them into a new window? I think something like this might be already possible with something like surf or uzbl and window manager cooperation.
- chriswarbo 9y ago
  Most tabbed browsers allow opening pages in a new tab. At a previous job I used https://github.com/mbhutton/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector https://github.com/mbhutton/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector ( http://chriswarbo.net/git/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector http://chriswarbo.net/git/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector ) for chrome, which was useful for switching to URLs from other programs (e.g. if a Web site's integration test failed, the error message would include a URL to see what (unexpected) output was found)
b0rsuk 9y ago
I think avoiding mouse interfaces is a valid goal. Mouse is necessary only for a few things: - graphical programs (but Blender makes a heavy use of hotkeys) - some games - new interfaces. Mouse is easier to use initially. Websites fall into this category, I'd say they're even a pathological case: it's pretty common for a website to radically change its interface. It can be partially dealt with, for example Konqueror used to display link hotkeys when you press CTRL. I need to look it up. Most of the time you don't require extra precision a mouse offers. A button press is binary, so why require precise movements, mess with icon sizes, etc ?

186 points by wyclif 9y ago

i3wm has been a huge productivity boost for me as a development machine at home for the following reasons: - no distractions - minimalism, most navigation on the keyboard - easy to setup a startup script that preloads your default screens / workspaces / apps setup - easy to map your workspaces in your mind From machine boot to coding: 30 seconds. https://twitter.com/Phonosheet/status/952179820447911936 https://twitter.com/Phonosheet/status/952179820447911936

overcast 9y ago
I've been experimenting with moving my "getting work done" setup over to an old laptop running just Mint Linux for that exact reasoning. I end up getting so distracted on my MacPro desktop, because it's got everything on there. Movies/Games/Messaging/Email etc. I need just a distraction free environment that still allows me to do web development.
- thurt 9y ago
  Instead of mint, if you are doing a new install and looking for a minimalist approach with i3, consider wattOS distro microwatt edition. I found it on distrowatch; I installed it about 6 months ago on an old laptop and I'm pretty happy with it.
  - overcast 9y ago
    Thanks for the response, is that based on debian/ubuntu? I need to have that environment to mirror production environments.
    - avhon1 9y ago
      Yes. http://planetwatt.com/new/index.php/about/ http://planetwatt.com/new/index.php/about/ "wattOS is a lightweight Linux operating system remastered from the core Ubuntu Linux build."
      - cellover 9y ago
        I did not know the existence of this distribution, thanks i'll look into it.
lprd 9y ago
Is there an equivilent to i3 in the mac ecosystem? I currently use iTerm with tmux... so would using a window manager, on top of all that, be overkill?
- cesnja 9y ago
  I used Amethyst and KWM in the past, but ultimately settled on Spectacleapp, which is great for basic window management. Sadly, neither of them can really compare with i3wm when you take into account the tabbed mode and easy window splitting.
flukus 9y ago
I finally got around to trying i3 a few weeks ago and I wish I'd done it a lot sooner. I installed it on my fairly crap dell laptop that can barely run windows 10 (windows in unusable on spinning disks) and it flies, everything is instant, alt+enter and the new terminal is just there, alt+d and the searchable program menu appears (windows could take several seconds to a minute), alt+3 and I'm on different virtual screen. The only time I find myself waiting for anything at all is a new browser window or the funky lock screen installed but I'm pretty sure both of those are solvable. The interface is fantastic, it's the first WM I've used (apart from maybe tmux or vim) that actually manages my windows well. In hindsight the desktop metaphor is such and obviously dead end that we've wasted for too much time on. It will take some retraining, but even things like tabs in the web browser no longer feel necessary, the WM can handle this and give a consistent global interface. MS is kind of heading in this direction too: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709190/microsoft-windows-10-tabs-file-explorer-sets-feature https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709190/microsoft-windo... . I started off with the manjaro distro (https://manjaro.org/category/community-editions/i3/ https://manjaro.org/category/community-editions/i3/), it's got a fair bit of bling that you won't get by default elsewhere but the performance is great.

b0rsuk 9y ago

I thought I was alone. Every one of us minimalists draws the line somewhere else. I like vim, Python, Rust, RSS, web of documents rather than web of applications, static blog generators, roguelike games, symbols and symbolic graphics in computer games and boardgames. I prefer Ultima IV graphics to Ultima V graphics , because the latter started drawing individual torches, chairs, dishes, bushes, etc. I'm not anti-modern. I just have an eclectic taste. I pick what I consider the best of various areas. I dislike most social media. I would like Twitter if it wasn't overrun by bots. I have a phone I can throw and break a window with, in fact I fell on it from my bike and it's still okay, but my clavicle broke. When people are starting at their smartphones I either look around (in a bus etc), at other people, through window, or read a book. I'm saving for an E-ink device, it's too bead the technology stagnated because of tablets and smartphones. I hate being labeled a luddite or cranky because I don't sheepishly run into every innovation. Not all change is progress.

dmos62 9y ago
It's pleasant to know you're not alone. Same here: cli, tmux, vim, rust, lisps, unix way of system development, webapp allergy, gopher > web, irc, dumb phone, eink reader that lasts months. I'm not anti-modern either, but it's hard to pinpoint what makes me choose differently than many others. Here's two relevant outlooks I hold, but I'd say that they are insufficient to explain this behaviour. Trend following has no value, unless to fool someone. Solution's popularity does not imply that it is better.
- bythckr 9y ago
  is Gopher still around?
cjf4 9y ago
Parklife!
swozey 9y ago
> I'm saving for an E-ink device, it's too bead the technology stagnated because of tablets and smartphones. While I'm one who thinks there's always room for improvement, I've owned about 5-6 various Kindles and if you're interested in having hundreds of books on one portable device you should just grab one. I've got the 1st (I believe) Paperwhite and it's all I need. I've looked at the newer Paperwhite and the Oasis but I just don't need the improvements they offer. Any paperwhite is fantastic. The reason I did upgrade to the paperwhite from whatever Kindle I had prior was the backlight was an absolute revolution. I used to have a battery powered light I had to stick on my previous kindle. The $80 for a Paperwhite is a great deal for what you get. I have 0 complaints. It could be a little faster and I prefer buying books on Amazon from my phone or laptop (edit: and not through the Kindle directly) then reading them on the Kindle but it's not a show stopper at all. Also, word of advice, if you're into Audible you can often find better deals by buying the Kindle version w/ Whispersync. I've almost bought $15-20 audible books before then saw that the kindle book was $7 and after that purchase the audiobook would be $3-5. It's not always the case but I can frequently find good deals on buying both.

na85 9y ago

Interesting read, but ultimately I was left confused as to the purpose of the article. As far as I can tell it was to express the author's disdain for the modern web stack (an embarrassment for web devs, to be sure) and to advocate using vim (yawn).

coldtea 9y ago
>As far as I can tell it was to express the author's disdain for the modern web stack It goes into way more than that. If by "purpose" you mean "what I get out of this", then not much. It's a rant, not some tutorial.
wyclif 9y ago
While I'd heard about Plan 9 and acme from following Rob Pike's work, I didn't know about acme-colors and that it takes a different approach than the typical syntax-highlighting theme. I found it interesting enough to experiment with.
heavenlyblue 9y ago
I think I mainly understand the point author tries to make: for example, it takes time to learn all of the shirtcuts in any GUI application (let's say, Slack) and become a power-user in it; so why not have a proper console interface if it's the same case for pushing buttons? Nevertheless Slack still manages to do it badly: Cmd+Shift+K takes 3 seconds to load the list of channels for a quick jump. How's that considered usable? It's something I generally miss: the ability to do actions using the keyboard. I think IDEA did it relatively well: their double-shift "Search everywhere" window works both fast and literally searches everything, providing something quite familiar to the console.
- suprfnk 9y ago
  > it takes time to learn all of the shirtcuts in any GUI application I'd say in most cases it takes more time to learn a console application. GUI's these days are, mostly, pretty intuitive. CLI applications are not intuitive at all. The difference is, for me, that GUI use quickly levels out in efficiency. _If_ I have learned the CLI commands and know them well, I generally can do tasks a whole lot quicker than a GUI I know well. It just has a higher up-front cost, which may be very worth it, to not worth it at all, depending on how much you use the application.

sheraz 9y ago

I think the author echos some things I've been feeling about my work environment (the desktop). There is a lot of friction that comes when each of my applications wants to be its own immersive experience. My take-away from his post is that he seems to be iterating away from those rich, colorful, and distracting interfaces to something that is kind of interface-less. This, too, is my dream (or sorts). - Spotify without the spotify interface. (Google Music, in his case) - Slack without the slack interface (IRC, I guess) - Email without the web-client or sluggish Apple mail interface. I know there are CLI for each of those use cases. But it takes commitment to learn and get them working to your liking.

cmiles74 9y ago
I think I'd go a little further, even: not only is there friction moving from one "immersive" application to another, there seems to be some expenditure of energy necessary to actually make the switch. Each fights in it's own way, not only to deliver on it's function but to somehow tempt you into spending ever more time with that particular application. A console or text-based interface seems like a big equalizer; for sure it's often easier to manage a console application but it puts hard limits on how much attention these applications may siphon away. Perhaps it's easier for my attention to wander than others, but when the task at hand is particularly boring or unpleasant, I find I can waste quite a lot of time browsing through music or "catching up" on likely useless Slack conversations. Since I've moved them to a text-based interface, I do feel I am wasting time like this far less often.
- SanderSantema 9y ago
  This is exactly the reason why I've tried to port as much stuff as I can to my terminal. Productivity in the sense of using a program faster is a nice by-product, but preserving my attention is way more important to me. To me it seems nowadays you don't pay hard cash for things online, you pay in attention. I'm trying to get my digital experience to serve me again instead of me serving to something which I'm using. On a sidenote: Any tips on making my digital experience less attention focused? For instance I would really like to use surf or uzbl but they don't have support for MacOS and I would still need an adblocker/ reader mode.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

I do this with emacs .

microcolonel 9y ago

I've been running basically the same stuff for the last six years. I have a somewhat modified fork of dwm, a lightly modified version of Termite (simplest working VTE3 terminal I could find), and my emacs (which has had basically the same configuration for the last four years). Most things take up the whole screen or the left or right division of it. I run the same thing on my high memory Xeon workstation that I do on my repurposed Chromebook and my OpenBSD ThinkPad. I can't really do anything about employer mandated Slack, but most corporate or hosted email is accessible through IMAPS and SMTP. Can't do much about Spotify, but I don't use that while working anyway, I tend to buy music files if it's convenient to do so, and I play those in cmus.

nextos 9y ago
Do you prefer VTE3-based terminals to urxvt?
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Yeah, I need iBus support for Japanese and Cyrillic input, and VTE3 interacts very well with input methods. I also find that VTE3 has the most legible (antialiased) text rendering and spacing/geometry of all the terminal emulators I've tried on Linux or OS X, especially when compared at smaller text sizes (7pt, for me). The default keyboard shortcuts are also pretty great in standard VTE3 terminals like Termite and GNOME Terminal (Ctrl + Shift + V for paste, Ctrl + Shift + C for copy), though that isn't specified by VTE3 itself. Rectangular selection works better in VTE3 than in URXVT or XTerm.
  - nextos 9y ago
    It looks nice, however there's no support for standard readline bindings?
Ascetik 9y ago
Clementine is the simplist Spotify replacement application I could find to avoid using their clunky app.

mbrock 9y ago

The way I see it, my whole computing environment is necessarily a kind of place. Emacs happens to be a really good one. So, I use Emacs as a window manager. My computer boots into a full screen Emacs, so I don't think of it as opening Emacs — I think of my computer as an Emacs-based thing, which in turn contains a bunch of other tools (like M-x shell for running shell commands). The way the author uses xterm with tmux and Vim, I use Emacs instead. My environment has a large font and no syntax highlighting. I find that language mode regexps so often get confused that they're more annoying than convenient. I would really, really like to try working with an e-ink monitor. Slow latency and monochrome would be a benefit as far as I'm concerned.

tomsmeding 9y ago
> I find that language mode regexps so often get confused that they're more annoying than convenient. For what language modes do you have that experience? I haven't used emacs myself much, but in other editors, most syntax highlighting descriptions are pretty good. The only exception to this rule is highlighting Haskell, which is apparently a monstrous challenge that no-one can even do remotely well.
- mbrock 9y ago
  It's really, really hard to make a completely correct mode based on regexes—just consider the challenge of writing a regex that correctly highlights the syntax of regex itself, which you need for JavaScript, Ruby, and lots of other languages. Heredocs in shell, metaprogramming tricks in Ruby, reader extensions in Lisp, nested quotes, etc etc etc—I might be weird, but I feel like I run into these edge cases a lot, when editors think my parens are unbalanced when they're actually not, and so on. Auto-indentation rarely formats things the way I want, too, and I very rarely need anything more advanced than shifting blocks in and out. I also just find it a bit strange that we have culturally started to believe that editing code is nearly unthinkable without different colors everywhere!
  - tomsmeding 9y ago
    I completely agree that highlighting code with regexps is almost useless, but if emacs is not capable of doing more than that (or its language modes usually do not do more than that), I think that emacs is at fault here, not syntax highlighting. In sublime text, for example, the syntax definitions are basically stack machines (if I'm not mistaken), and can therefore parse any context-free grammar. This is clearly powerful enough to handle all the edge cases you mention.

patrickmay 9y ago

"There’s a way in which you could say that Emacs is a place whereas vi is a tool." As an Emacs user, I agree with this. The author's preference for more tools and fewer immersive applications still resonates with me because I see Emacs as a place for all the tools I need for development and writing.

nextos 9y ago
That's true. Emacs is a platform, a virtual Lisp machine. The Web is another platform. Plus our OS plumbing, usually Unix. Understanding my computer this way has brought me a lot of sanity. I only use a tiling window manager (xmonad), Emacs, a browser (firefox) and a Unix terminal (urxvt). Previously I was trying to move most of my computing into pure Unix CLI. While it was fast and simple, I found most ncurses applications (e.g. mutt, remind, irssi) do not really compose as well as simple Unix programs do (e.g. wc, grep, xargs). Moving everything to elisp packages instead (e.g. org, notmuch, magit), where all elisp nicely blends together has been a great improvement. Plus dealing with configuration in a functional way, by switching to NixOS.
dleslie 9y ago
Indeed; Emacs is a place that I take with me wherever I go, because it adapts to wherever I put it with little to no configuration on my part. My tools come with me wherever I go, not unlike a travelling caravan.

bprasanna 9y ago

Can someone please identify the font used in code snippet (image)?

rwnspace 9y ago
https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ To do this: ctrl+U (in FF) -> look for css link at top of html -> look for font names near top of css.
- bprasanna 9y ago
  Thanks a ton!
ilconsigliere 9y ago
It's Computer Modern, from LaTeX. He mentions it in the article. The css trick mentioned in the other comment doesn't work for fonts in images.

foxhop 9y ago

> There’s a way in which you could say that Emacs is a place whereas vi is a tool. This really resonates with me, and I have to say I agree. I try to treat my browser as a tool, it holds state only for as long as it's open. I pretend that at any time the browser (or computer) could crash and I would loose my place. I use my web browser (I switched back to Firefox from many years with Chrome) very similar to how I use my email inbox. For email this is "inbox zero". If I need to reread an email, respond, or do something with a message, I mark it as unread. Unread stuff gets cleared at least once a day (often more now that I have a smart phone). I open my email and work it down to zero (or as close as I can) and then I close it. Email acts as a tool, a communication / todo list, hybrid. An unread email is the same as an open browser tab, it symbolizes work-in-progress. With my web broswer, I open it as needed and open as many tabs or even windows as I need. When a tab, window, or page is no longer needed, I close it. To "save" a page I create a bookmark (but I can't tell you the last time I've actually used bookmarks to find something). Another way I "save" is when I'm tearing down my web browser, I pull a page's tab out into it's own window. This marks it as "unread"; I need to do something with it. This process doesn't really save the page, it just allows me to clear out the other tabs and context out of my head. It helps me focus, and reminds me to just do that task on the single tab instead of letting it linger. I close my web browser multiple times a day. I follow this practice with my terminal windows as well.

b0rsuk 9y ago
To easily emulate this sort of browser behavior, just use it in Porn Mode (Privacy Mode).

sk1pper 9y ago

To me, true minimalism on my desktop came from stopping messing around with different window managers, IDEs, whatever to try to maximize my experience. Specifically, command line interfaces to Slack and GPM just add more headache and frustration. My setup: a terminal with tmux; Firefox; Spotify. (Recently switched from GPM, would recommend). Stock everything except dark themes on some stuff and caps lock->ctrl. I don’t have some super-enlightened workflow where everything is in terminal or has keybinds or something. But more importantly, I’m not continually wasting time on changing my env and adding complexity.

staplers 9y ago
Try Spotify in Firefox. Even simpler.
- endisukaj 9y ago
  And enable DRM in my web browser? No thank you.
walshemj 9y ago
Which is it CLI or GUI is better for you its not clear and for an experienced developer often CLI is better than GUI a shell to MySQL is better that the abomination that is PHPMYSQL.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Really saying that a CLI to a RDBMS is better than a GUI (PHPMYADMIN) there must be more script kiddies on hn than I thought
  - sweeneyrod 9y ago
    No, just a lot of people who like punctuation.
freehunter 9y ago
Learning to stop spending so much time customizing everything and work with the defaults was one of the hardest but most productive lessons I’ve learned over the years. I used to have a custom bashrc and custom vim and everything on my phone was custom and I put a lot of effort into it. I even found the perfect keyboard layout for me and switched my keyboards to that. To the point where I couldn’t effectively use someone else’s machine. And then I became a consultant and was logging into someone else’s machine every day, often when I couldn’t install any customizations at all. I learned to love bash as-is, and vim as-is. And my custom launcher stopped working, so I switched back to the default Android launcher. And then my work gave me an iPhone that I couldn’t customize. And suddenly I was spending more time working and less time customizing and my productivity shot through the roof. All I had to do was stop seeking things to make me work better and actually just start working. And in addition to higher productivity, I now had more free time in the day because my work got done faster. It really is freeing in a Zen-like fashion to just use a tool as-is and not constantly wonder how you could make it 5% better or 3% faster.

kenbolton 9y ago

I've been fantasizing recently about using a Bluetooth keyboard (Twiddler3) connected to an eInk reader to do most of my work both locally and on remote machines/instances. The eInk reader would have just enough power to run spacemacs. I can currently do this on an Android smartphone, but the experience is lacking because of the screen-size.

sleepybrett 9y ago
I already have enough frustration using an eink screen for reading books around the refresh rate of updating that page that I couldn't even imagine the pain of trying to use one interactively.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Imagine then what life was like when an editor meant a line editor and output universally referred to stacks of fan-fold green and white lined paper. The 'refresh rate' of a line editor would be a couple of seconds at best and to do an edit-compile-test cycle would be on the order of a couple of hours, two per day if you are lucky, but most likely only one per day.
KG_5 9y ago
Well look at this: https://hackaday.com/2018/01/15/this-portable-pi-may-not-be-what-you-expect/ https://hackaday.com/2018/01/15/this-portable-pi-may-not-be-...

TeddyDD 9y ago

It seems I'm heading in similar direction as author of the post. I switched from Gnome to i3 (I don't even have display manager installed), from Nautilius to ranger and then to [lf](https://github.com/gokcehan/lf https://github.com/gokcehan/lf). I use a lot of CLI tools like weechat. I'v been using Emacs for few months but now I prefer Kakoune - it's easier to customize. My [website](https://www.teddydd.me/ https://www.teddydd.me/) is pure html+css brutalism without single line of JavaScript... I just feel tired of huge, complicated software that requires big time investment to customize. I want things to be simple and modular. My setup is not beautiful, might have fewer features than full DE, but it's ergonomic and I understand what all my configs do.

munificent 9y ago

Does anyone else remember the WinAmp era of music software? There was a time when basically every app for playing music on your computer lived inside a little floating window that you carried with you to all of the other apps you were using at the time. That really did help me think of my music player as a tool and not a place. Though the little scrolling text could be distracting sometimes, I do occasionally find myself missing that style of interface.

b0rsuk 9y ago
Hahaha I was going to post that one, I just wanted to read other replies first. My WinAmp substitute is Audacious. It plays music, has repeat, shuffle, playlists, and little more. I tried to use Amarok to see what the fuss is about and was repulsed. It's not an audio player, it's an unfocused sound-related system thingy.
lostconfused 9y ago
Pretty sure Foobar2000 is still the most common go to audio playback software for audiophiles and enthusiasts.
blunte 9y ago
This is perhaps the opposite of minimalism, but I miss the days of Winamp and really awesome visualizations. When Winamp fell away, iTunes and the rest just never bothered to make many entertaining visualizations. It's too bad - some of the wa visualizers were so entrancing that it really did enhance the "listening" experience.
romwell 9y ago
Well, I've never had a single reason for abandoning WinAmp for playing music that lives on my hard drive - so yes, I do remember. WinAmp is a tool, and it still works. If you aren't using it, perhaps you actually want a place instead of a tool?
- munificent 9y ago
  I do still want a tool, but I no longer maintain a local corpus of music files. I prefer streaming services these days.

ssivark 9y ago

> Every change I’ve made in my working environment over the past year or so has also been a lessening of immersiveness. My interfaces have become less rich, less colorful, less dynamic. I really like the author's place -vs- tool metaphor to contrast wannabe immersive experiences with tools that stay out of your way. I don't think it makes sense to avoid having places you go to (where you feel "at home") -- I mean that very generally, but even in the specific case of computing, your goto places might be your favorite browser, the command line, the unix system, Emacs, your IDE etc. A place where you feel at home, at control, with a sense of the multitude of possibilities lying ahead, and still in the driver's seat. The important requirement then is that the environment shouldn't try to nudge you around (especially towards misaligned goals). This is where most web/software platforms of today come up short, IMHO. This metaphor is also the best elucidation of Alan Kay's pithy quote (reproduced approximately): To me, a computer is worth more than my car, because of all the things it enables me to do. Most people, however, pay about as much for a computer, as they pay for a TV, and use it in roughly the same way.

qznc 9y ago
I also like the distinction of “tool” and “place”. It feels like a useful mental concept. I can see a relation to the economics of software development. Companies want their products to be places, so they capture a slice of your attention and deepen awareness of their brand. Nvidia is an example: It is just a single part of the computer hardware, yet it comes with a GUI tool and often demands attention. Free software can afford to become a tool. Imagine if you boot a Linux desktop and various involved projects show you a series of splash screens first: This desktop experience brought to you by systemd, dbus, dnsmasq, CUPS, NetworkManager, PulseAudio, Gnome, Mozilla Firefox, Gnome Keyring Daemon, gvfsd, and bash.

alfonsodev 9y ago

related, "Optimal colors to improve readability for people with dyslexia" [1] [1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/r11 https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/r11

totalperspectiv 9y ago

Is there an Acme / Plan 9 theme for Sublime? Initial Googlings don't show anything.

b0rsuk 9y ago

I like various discussion forums and talking to people online (often on IRC - when I'm programming). I like exchange of ideas, even arguing - as long as it remains respectful. I consider message boards / forums bloated and clunky. I miss usenet and threaded discussion. Disqus technically does that, but it takes what, 20 seconds to load ? And after recent acquisition it's only going to get worse. I think threaded discussion is much more like natural human conversation than "topics" on message boards. That's shoe-horning discussion. They invariably get off topic sooner or later, and moderators pride themselves on deleting posts that stray too far. It boggles my mind why topic-based message boards remain popular.

KajMagnus 9y ago
Maybe Talkyard is a bit different? It's new forum software, threaded, inspired by Hacker News: https://www.talkyard.io https://www.talkyard.io. (I'm developing it) With improvements over HN: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... Hmm I think threaded discussions, make the more sense, the more people join the discussion. If 999 people talk about something, they're going to split up into smaller groups, each group talking about a sub topic = thread. And everything laid out in a flat way = a huge mess. But if just 5 people talk about something — then they can stay focused on the same thing all of them. Flat = more ok.
- RealityVoid 9y ago
  I think that is a pretty cool project there. I like it but I don't know, do you get many people using it? I think there are quite a bit of forum platforms out there.
  - KajMagnus 9y ago
    > do you get many people using it? No not yet. So far I've been focused on coding though (and I've learned that's the wrong way to get things done, I should instead start with validating the idea). But now a MVP is finished, and I'm shifting focus to marketing & PR. And one of the first steps, is ... to rename the project from EffectiveDiscussions to Talkyard. That's what I've been doing the past week, and ... the plan thereafter is to focus a bit on embedded comments for static site generators. There seems to be a slight vacuum here; Disqus isn't so popular any longer, it seems to me, among tech people = those who use static generators. > there are quite a bit of forum platforms out there Yes that's a problem for me. When I started this, in year 2010, there weren't. But I spent many years doing the wrong things, getting a job again & doing this on the spare time only ... and now suddenly there's Discourse, Flarum, Slack, Mattermost, Rocket Chat, Spot.IM, Discord, Matrix, and others. Maybe I was too slow. On the other hand, Talkyard is the only project with HackerNews topic types + chat features combined, so maybe it can find its niche.

bitwize 9y ago

Emacs is sort of a weird beast -- simultaneously tool and workbench. It can be infinitely shaped to fit the task at hand -- while it is in use -- but it integrates relatively smoothly with all the other tools available in a modern Unix environment, allowing those tools to extend the reach of Emacs without becoming part of it. But really, I -- and everybody else -- should really just use an IDE. For OO languages you need to have intelligent refactoring (and IntelliSense) and so you need to have an IDE. Refactoring tools are to programming what nondestructive editing is to image editing: a total paradigm shift in workflow that no one these days can live without. It takes a lot of effort to extend Emacs to understand the target language well enough to support these features (and it won't be done in elisp).

nwah1 9y ago

There's a lot of arguments that various people make regarding the supposed superiority of different setups. 1) It is claimed that using keyboard-only controls reduces "context switching." 2) It is claimed that tiling window managers are simpler and more logical, because you use more of the screen real estate and keep everything open all the time. 3) It is claimed that vim and emacs are better because the brief keyboard commands allow for amazing power with few keystrokes. Alas, these are almost all arguments voiced by people who grew up with technologies built around severely limited hardware constraints. GUIs were terrible for the longest time, and ten or twenty years ago you certainly couldn't get acceptable performance on them when working remotely. There are very good reasons why people would avoid all of these tools. Hardware is much better. Compositing window managers are much better. It is particularly understandable that people avoid vim and emacs. And there's really no empirical evidence at all that they save time, improve accuracy, or anything else. And any empirical studies on this question would have difficulty isolating the variables. People who do understand systems at the low level, and with all the historical context, could very well be better programmers in some ways... but not because of their environment. Thinking you could become like Richard Stallman by using emacs is cargo cult reasoning.

YuukiRey 9y ago

Funny because I just went the other way. I was running Arch/i3 on a Lenovo W530 I had for work. At some point I couldn't take it anymore. I wanted to use my headsets over bluetooth. I wanted to have no issues with monitor DPI and scaling and the dreaded optimus Nvidia technology. I don't want to have to think about which port I use to connect to an external monitor. I want Wifi to be a solved problem. Boot the laptop, choose the network, enter password, done. I want good battery life and the most basic compositing features enabled. In hindsight it's crazy that I'd fiddle with WM_STATE_SOMETHING in compton so that X has shadow but Y doesn't if they overlap with transparency (or something like that). My dunst notifications looked very aesthetically pleasing but... so do countless default notifications on mainstream distros. Yes, the whole mopidy/mcp/whatever looks really rad, especially if a program uses vi(m) keyboard shortcuts, but my music player really isn't something I want to think about and learn. Playing music isn't such an integral part of my work day that I need to make it more efficient. I am now using a MacBook Pro at work and on my desktop at home I use Antergos with Gnome. The latter is perfect as it gives me up-to-date packages and easy access to the AUR, while still coming with the bells and whistles of Gnome. I am also not sure if tiling windows really improve your productivity. I would say that most people would be better of having their apps on full-screen, to minimize distractions, instead of having all sorts of windows side-by-side. Ultimately I nowadays resonate more with what some other posts have mentioned: pick a platform and programs with sane defaults and only deviate from them if it's really worth it. If your job requires you to look at several terminals at the same time constantly and things like terminator/tmux/gnome-terminal don't do it, then sure, look into i3 (herbstluftwm/[insert flavor of the month]). Anything else I would now consider premature optimization.

Pete_D 9y ago

Emacs doesn't feel like either a tool or a place to me. If you use emacsdaemon and emacsclient, it becomes not a fixed place you work in, or a completely static tool, but something like a part of the ether you can draw from when needed. There's background state, but much less of the spatial/navigational burdens the author talks about. It's interesting they go on to mention mpd. I'm not just saying this just to nitpick - I think the stateful daemon concept is a useful extension to the place/tool metaphor and might be a way to achieve the author's desired web browsing experience. For example, what if web browsers could move tabs to a sort of "invisible window", and there was some shell command like "recall-tab Hacker News" which foregrounded them into a new window? I think something like this might be already possible with something like surf or uzbl and window manager cooperation.

chriswarbo 9y ago
Most tabbed browsers allow opening pages in a new tab. At a previous job I used https://github.com/mbhutton/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector https://github.com/mbhutton/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector ( http://chriswarbo.net/git/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector http://chriswarbo.net/git/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector ) for chrome, which was useful for switching to URLs from other programs (e.g. if a Web site's integration test failed, the error message would include a URL to see what (unexpected) output was found)

b0rsuk 9y ago

I think avoiding mouse interfaces is a valid goal. Mouse is necessary only for a few things: - graphical programs (but Blender makes a heavy use of hotkeys) - some games - new interfaces. Mouse is easier to use initially. Websites fall into this category, I'd say they're even a pathological case: it's pretty common for a website to radically change its interface. It can be partially dealt with, for example Konqueror used to display link hotkeys when you press CTRL. I need to look it up. Most of the time you don't require extra precision a mouse offers. A button press is binary, so why require precise movements, mess with icon sizes, etc ?