5 ms·

People who can configure their shells are not their target audience. For once, if you walk into any research center or academic environment and look over the sh

by dangom 5y ago

People who can configure their shells are not their target audience. For once, if you walk into any research center or academic environment and look over the shoulders of people who have to code or use a terminal because they have no other option, you would see that the vast majority know little beyond cd and ls. I wouldn't be surprised some would pay for directory completion alone. Can those who know what zsh mean do a better job with existing tools or custom made scripts? 100%, but that doesn't matter. Beyond that, you can level up even further by firing up Emacs and never again needing a terminal for things that require completion.

f6v 5y ago
> if you walk into any research center or academic environment If they use their institution's infrastructure, it's managed by the dedicated system admins. No way they're going to allow this tool to be installed.
- gspr 5y ago
  While I have exactly 0% belief in the success of Fig, and share a lot of the negative sentiment expressed in this thread, your parent post does make a point. I spent 10 years in the kind of academic setting described. A LARGE part of the work of the people in this example do their work on ordinary self-managed laptops without a sysadmin in sight (and probably very little common language in which to even begin communicating with a sysadmin, if they even know what a sysadmin is). The amount of time that is wasted by ordinary researchers being very uncomfortable with the terminal is staggering. Although I was/am a researcher in my own right, I do feel that I had an order of magnitude greater positive impact on research by helping out the approximate dozen of other researchers around me do their terminal and programming work more efficiently/better/smoothly/reliably. I definitely think there's huge room for improvement in this area. But I don't think something like Fig is the answer; safe and effective use of Fig seems to require enough wherewithal to ask someone (or google) how to set up bog standard autocompletion solution in the first place.
  - f6v 5y ago
    There definitely is a point. I've witnessed too many biologists who decided to get into data analysis struggle with UNIX. I think https://missing.csail.mit.edu https://missing.csail.mit.edu is more of an answer. Most graduate programs just assume you'd pick it up on your own, but the majority doesn't.
- dangom 5y ago
  You install it in your own terminal on your own computer, not on the institutions' computers. Also, for research that doesn't handle personal identifiable information (think civil engineering or astronomy), I don't think it'd be an issue to have Fig read the parts of the filesystem to which admins gave you read access anyway. Hopefully autocomplete would work over ssh.
gtf21 5y ago
Perhaps, but then a better option would be to contribute back to the ecosystem by creating a nice DSL to compile back to zsh etc. completions and making a nice installer on top of that. I don't see how "autocomplete in your terminal" is really a company given that the people who would pay for tools like this will probably be power users, who would (I assume) prefer the built-in tools.

by dangom 5y ago

f6v 5y ago

> if you walk into any research center or academic environment If they use their institution's infrastructure, it's managed by the dedicated system admins. No way they're going to allow this tool to be installed.

gspr 5y ago
While I have exactly 0% belief in the success of Fig, and share a lot of the negative sentiment expressed in this thread, your parent post does make a point. I spent 10 years in the kind of academic setting described. A LARGE part of the work of the people in this example do their work on ordinary self-managed laptops without a sysadmin in sight (and probably very little common language in which to even begin communicating with a sysadmin, if they even know what a sysadmin is). The amount of time that is wasted by ordinary researchers being very uncomfortable with the terminal is staggering. Although I was/am a researcher in my own right, I do feel that I had an order of magnitude greater positive impact on research by helping out the approximate dozen of other researchers around me do their terminal and programming work more efficiently/better/smoothly/reliably. I definitely think there's huge room for improvement in this area. But I don't think something like Fig is the answer; safe and effective use of Fig seems to require enough wherewithal to ask someone (or google) how to set up bog standard autocompletion solution in the first place.
- f6v 5y ago
  There definitely is a point. I've witnessed too many biologists who decided to get into data analysis struggle with UNIX. I think https://missing.csail.mit.edu https://missing.csail.mit.edu is more of an answer. Most graduate programs just assume you'd pick it up on your own, but the majority doesn't.
dangom 5y ago
You install it in your own terminal on your own computer, not on the institutions' computers. Also, for research that doesn't handle personal identifiable information (think civil engineering or astronomy), I don't think it'd be an issue to have Fig read the parts of the filesystem to which admins gave you read access anyway. Hopefully autocomplete would work over ssh.

gtf21 5y ago

Perhaps, but then a better option would be to contribute back to the ecosystem by creating a nice DSL to compile back to zsh etc. completions and making a nice installer on top of that. I don't see how "autocomplete in your terminal" is really a company given that the people who would pay for tools like this will probably be power users, who would (I assume) prefer the built-in tools.