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Can confirm. Started out writing code in IDEs, now I'm using Vim and CLI utilities. It's a polished, stable ecosystem that doesn't hide anything from the user a

Can confirm. Started out writing code in IDEs, now I'm using Vim and CLI utilities. It's a polished, stable ecosystem that doesn't hide anything from the user and isn't incentivised to do anything other than its purpose, and that becomes very noticeable once you're familiar with it. It doesn't come with file sync, plugin management or flashy animations. But I also don't get loading screens, don't need to look at SaaS pricing tiers and don't get overwhelmed by UI dark patterns. That's a trade-off I'll take any day.

ryandrake 6y ago
One of the great things about command-line interfaces of old are that you could often enter your keyboard input faster than the system could respond to it, and it was OK because the system buffered them up for you and executed them as it caught up. So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace. With "better" GUI/mouse based systems, you have to click here, wait... wait... wait..., now click there, wait... wait... wait..., then click there and type in your SKU. Your attention needs to be on the screen at all times in order to wait for the UI and aim the mouse. Next time you go to your bank web site to pay a bill, think to yourself: Wouldn't it be nice if, rather than navigating their cumbersome UX, you could just hit a known string of keystrokes that you memorized, hit enter, then walk away to get coffee while all the Javascript and page reloading chugged along and paid your bill?
- pmontra 6y ago
  That would be nice but it is impossible because to actually commit some money I have to go through 2FA involving the bank app on my phone and enter one or two other secrets on the bank website. This is Italy and probably most of EU since the last year. I understand this is for the safety of my money, probably also for the safety of the bank itself (if something goes wrong it's more and more my fault) but sending money to someone is becoming a PITA.
  - rbinv 6y ago
    Even checking your balance from your non-mobile device is quite a pain now. It's much more likely for me to miss a fraudulent transaction now since I no longer login on a daily basis.
- SilasX 6y ago
  So much this! I've noticed how common it is that interfaces can't keep up with me when, by all rights, they should be able to! I'm a limited, slow human, while their instructions execute billions of times per second. And yet I'm constantly running into scenarios were the next screen comes up and I try to give it an input, but it's not ready. Or when I hit the next-preset button for my car radio, and yet it has to pause to load that station before I can use the button again.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    Yea. I have 48 cores on my workstation at work, dozens of gigabeans of RAM and an ultra-mega-terra-gigabit ethernet connection, and still I sit there watching spinners as websites composed primarily of text and images struggle to load. It's like we're regressing year after year.
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      Right, any desktop app where you have to wait for a non-stupid operation (like a Gaussian blur on a 50mpix image) makes me want to throw my computer through the window. It's 100% unacceptable, every interaction should have its result in the very next frame, and we have all the tools for that.
- myth2018 6y ago
  Indeed. I'd never realized the power of keyboard strokes buffering
- loceng 6y ago
  "So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace." This gave me goosebumps.
zdragnar 6y ago
There actually are a few plugin managers for Vim. I think i used Vundle once upon a time, but honestly don't recall. My biggest pet peeve with vim and emacs is that (a) discovery sucks as with most all text mode tools, and (b) emacs in particular is slow and difficult to configure to get some mainstream languages working. Doom was the closest I ever got to being happy with my setup, but the tooltips and autocomplete were still objectively inferior even to vscode (for typescript and react, at least). Lisps are a different story, but not by much. I'm actually fairly happy with using vscode to write common lisp, though I don't do much of it these days.
- yw3410 6y ago
  What? Discovery in Emacs is amazing; all the API is a keystroke away. Do you mean something else?
  - gegtik 6y ago
    *discovery for laymen
    - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
      Emacs tells you to hit "Ctrl-h" when you start it. The documentation for Emacs is about as good as you can get for a software product. (Now let's talk about Excel if you want to discuss discoverability issues.)
      - gegtik 6y ago
        Sorry to come at this late but there's discoverability-by-doing and I think it's clear from general user feedback that emacs doesn't have it. I agree it's very well documented, and I assume your impulse upon reading the previous paragraph is to tell me there's a REPL. it's simply not casually approachable. sorry. ask someone who isn't drowning in koolaid!
- vulcan01 6y ago
  Note that the GP said > It doesn't come with... plugin management Also, for Vim, `:<tab>` gives you all available commands in the current buffer and `:h command` gives you the vim help page for that command (which is usually at least a few sentences long, and pretty thorough).

ryandrake 6y ago

One of the great things about command-line interfaces of old are that you could often enter your keyboard input faster than the system could respond to it, and it was OK because the system buffered them up for you and executed them as it caught up. So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace. With "better" GUI/mouse based systems, you have to click here, wait... wait... wait..., now click there, wait... wait... wait..., then click there and type in your SKU. Your attention needs to be on the screen at all times in order to wait for the UI and aim the mouse. Next time you go to your bank web site to pay a bill, think to yourself: Wouldn't it be nice if, rather than navigating their cumbersome UX, you could just hit a known string of keystrokes that you memorized, hit enter, then walk away to get coffee while all the Javascript and page reloading chugged along and paid your bill?

pmontra 6y ago
That would be nice but it is impossible because to actually commit some money I have to go through 2FA involving the bank app on my phone and enter one or two other secrets on the bank website. This is Italy and probably most of EU since the last year. I understand this is for the safety of my money, probably also for the safety of the bank itself (if something goes wrong it's more and more my fault) but sending money to someone is becoming a PITA.
- rbinv 6y ago
  Even checking your balance from your non-mobile device is quite a pain now. It's much more likely for me to miss a fraudulent transaction now since I no longer login on a daily basis.
SilasX 6y ago
So much this! I've noticed how common it is that interfaces can't keep up with me when, by all rights, they should be able to! I'm a limited, slow human, while their instructions execute billions of times per second. And yet I'm constantly running into scenarios were the next screen comes up and I try to give it an input, but it's not ready. Or when I hit the next-preset button for my car radio, and yet it has to pause to load that station before I can use the button again.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Yea. I have 48 cores on my workstation at work, dozens of gigabeans of RAM and an ultra-mega-terra-gigabit ethernet connection, and still I sit there watching spinners as websites composed primarily of text and images struggle to load. It's like we're regressing year after year.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    Right, any desktop app where you have to wait for a non-stupid operation (like a Gaussian blur on a 50mpix image) makes me want to throw my computer through the window. It's 100% unacceptable, every interaction should have its result in the very next frame, and we have all the tools for that.
myth2018 6y ago
Indeed. I'd never realized the power of keyboard strokes buffering
loceng 6y ago
"So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace." This gave me goosebumps.

zdragnar 6y ago

There actually are a few plugin managers for Vim. I think i used Vundle once upon a time, but honestly don't recall. My biggest pet peeve with vim and emacs is that (a) discovery sucks as with most all text mode tools, and (b) emacs in particular is slow and difficult to configure to get some mainstream languages working. Doom was the closest I ever got to being happy with my setup, but the tooltips and autocomplete were still objectively inferior even to vscode (for typescript and react, at least). Lisps are a different story, but not by much. I'm actually fairly happy with using vscode to write common lisp, though I don't do much of it these days.

yw3410 6y ago
What? Discovery in Emacs is amazing; all the API is a keystroke away. Do you mean something else?
- gegtik 6y ago
  *discovery for laymen
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    Emacs tells you to hit "Ctrl-h" when you start it. The documentation for Emacs is about as good as you can get for a software product. (Now let's talk about Excel if you want to discuss discoverability issues.)
    - gegtik 6y ago
      Sorry to come at this late but there's discoverability-by-doing and I think it's clear from general user feedback that emacs doesn't have it. I agree it's very well documented, and I assume your impulse upon reading the previous paragraph is to tell me there's a REPL. it's simply not casually approachable. sorry. ask someone who isn't drowning in koolaid!
vulcan01 6y ago
Note that the GP said > It doesn't come with... plugin management Also, for Vim, `:<tab>` gives you all available commands in the current buffer and `:h command` gives you the vim help page for that command (which is usually at least a few sentences long, and pretty thorough).