4 ms·

> I'm baffled at the insistence of a word process in a terminal, honestly. I don't know what to tell you, some people are more productive working in a terminal

by taviso 6y ago

> I'm baffled at the insistence of a word process in a terminal, honestly. I don't know what to tell you, some people are more productive working in a terminal. I like being able to ssh in, reattach to a screen/tmux session that has my email (mutt), development environment (gdb+vim+ycm), word processor (dosemu+wp), and so on. This is how I've worked for a long time. I agree that everything I use a computer for could be achieved (far less efficiently, but without the steep learning curve) using GUI tools, but I value the efficiency gain and don't mind investing in learning new powerful tools.

ubermonkey 6y ago
I hear people insist they're more efficient in a terminal, and some tasks are friendly to this bias -- but not all of them. And when it comes to the ones not fundamentally text-mode in nature, I have yet to really SEE that happen from those same people when I've worked closely with them. IME, these people are also the ones who insist that the tasks a terminal is bad at, and that they consequently have trouble doing efficiently (e.g., well-formatted text, or formatting text in line with a shared template) are somehow not important or legitimate. The super common pattern is a refusal to engage in HTML email, for example. Sure, mutt is fast for plaintext mail, but if you have to engage in some additional toolchain machinations to read (let alone create) an HTML mail, you lose a bunch of those efficiency points. Maybe you're different! It's possible! But I haven't seen it. As for myself, I absolutely still do composition in plain text 99% of the time, because I've been bitten by extinct file formats too many times. But I'm running native emacs under OSX, in a graphical environment, when I do it. When I need to do something for production to a client, I'm in Word, because it makes creating an attractive document far, far easier than with any prior tool. (Including, it chagrins me to note, Word 5 for DOS.)
- taviso 6y ago
  I think I'm pretty efficient, but maybe you're right and I'd be even more effective if I just used Microsoft Office and Outlook, but I doubt it. It's not like I don't know how to use an graphical email client, and I believe I can achieve tasks that would take you many minutes in a few keystrokes. It seems like you have strong opinions on how a word processor should operate, but this seems like calling emacs more modern than vim, because it uses elisp (i.e. just your opinion, and not a universal truth). I don't really mind what word processor you use, and think Microsoft Word is a perfectly valid choice if it works well for you. I think I'm happy with my workflow at the moment, and don't plan on changing it.

by taviso 6y ago

ubermonkey 6y ago

I hear people insist they're more efficient in a terminal, and some tasks are friendly to this bias -- but not all of them. And when it comes to the ones not fundamentally text-mode in nature, I have yet to really SEE that happen from those same people when I've worked closely with them. IME, these people are also the ones who insist that the tasks a terminal is bad at, and that they consequently have trouble doing efficiently (e.g., well-formatted text, or formatting text in line with a shared template) are somehow not important or legitimate. The super common pattern is a refusal to engage in HTML email, for example. Sure, mutt is fast for plaintext mail, but if you have to engage in some additional toolchain machinations to read (let alone create) an HTML mail, you lose a bunch of those efficiency points. Maybe you're different! It's possible! But I haven't seen it. As for myself, I absolutely still do composition in plain text 99% of the time, because I've been bitten by extinct file formats too many times. But I'm running native emacs under OSX, in a graphical environment, when I do it. When I need to do something for production to a client, I'm in Word, because it makes creating an attractive document far, far easier than with any prior tool. (Including, it chagrins me to note, Word 5 for DOS.)

taviso 6y ago
I think I'm pretty efficient, but maybe you're right and I'd be even more effective if I just used Microsoft Office and Outlook, but I doubt it. It's not like I don't know how to use an graphical email client, and I believe I can achieve tasks that would take you many minutes in a few keystrokes. It seems like you have strong opinions on how a word processor should operate, but this seems like calling emacs more modern than vim, because it uses elisp (i.e. just your opinion, and not a universal truth). I don't really mind what word processor you use, and think Microsoft Word is a perfectly valid choice if it works well for you. I think I'm happy with my workflow at the moment, and don't plan on changing it.