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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 moder

by 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.
  - mbrock 9y ago
    CLI programs that have decent --help feel very intuitive to me, especially if they're designed by someone with experience using command line tools. GUI programs can be intuitive too, but they also have their own special anti-intuitive things: meaningless icons, weird drag and drop paradigms, etc.
  - heavenlyblue 9y ago
    What I am speaking for here is not the CLI per se, but the fact that a CLI interface is generally a flat interface. That is: there's one place where you will be able access all of the commands, and as much the help for them. A multi-tabbed configuration would be the worst counter-example of the former. On the other hand mentioning IDEA again - their config window (Cmd+,) directly allows one to search for the elements of the configuration in a flat manner. That's damn efficient. Have you ever tried to scroll through a list of 100s of items? What if all of these items are in pop-over menu that closes if you accidentally click outside it? How much easier that is in a console though. I would always vouch for software that is both easy to use right from the start, but neither does not hide it's functionality anymore: just the way we have moved from yellow pages on the internet arranged in a tree-like fashion for a purely flat Google interface, I would like to be able to use software in the same non-hierarchical way.
- seawlf 9y ago
  For what it's worth, you can just to Ctrl+K (and I assume Cmd+K) in Slack to quickly jump to a channel, no need for shift.
  - heavenlyblue 9y ago
    Thanks for the tip. But I am still appalled: 0.5 sec to show the dialog, 2 more seconds to load the chat window (MBP 2014). That's depressing.
Y_Y 9y ago
I understood the purpose to be identifying "immersive" (emacs-like) programs that sick you in and trigger a mental context-switch, versus vim-like transient tools that you pick up and put down as you need them, all without leaving the mental "place" you're in. He then argues that this effect is significant and wonders how we can get less immersive software.

by na85 9y ago

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.
- mbrock 9y ago
  CLI programs that have decent --help feel very intuitive to me, especially if they're designed by someone with experience using command line tools. GUI programs can be intuitive too, but they also have their own special anti-intuitive things: meaningless icons, weird drag and drop paradigms, etc.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  What I am speaking for here is not the CLI per se, but the fact that a CLI interface is generally a flat interface. That is: there's one place where you will be able access all of the commands, and as much the help for them. A multi-tabbed configuration would be the worst counter-example of the former. On the other hand mentioning IDEA again - their config window (Cmd+,) directly allows one to search for the elements of the configuration in a flat manner. That's damn efficient. Have you ever tried to scroll through a list of 100s of items? What if all of these items are in pop-over menu that closes if you accidentally click outside it? How much easier that is in a console though. I would always vouch for software that is both easy to use right from the start, but neither does not hide it's functionality anymore: just the way we have moved from yellow pages on the internet arranged in a tree-like fashion for a purely flat Google interface, I would like to be able to use software in the same non-hierarchical way.
seawlf 9y ago
For what it's worth, you can just to Ctrl+K (and I assume Cmd+K) in Slack to quickly jump to a channel, no need for shift.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  Thanks for the tip. But I am still appalled: 0.5 sec to show the dialog, 2 more seconds to load the chat window (MBP 2014). That's depressing.

Y_Y 9y ago

I understood the purpose to be identifying "immersive" (emacs-like) programs that sick you in and trigger a mental context-switch, versus vim-like transient tools that you pick up and put down as you need them, all without leaving the mental "place" you're in. He then argues that this effect is significant and wonders how we can get less immersive software.