6 ms·

I am not sure if it's only me, but as time passes I find myself using more and more simple Terminal stuff. No fancy air/earth lines, no fancy formatting, no fan

I am not sure if it's only me, but as time passes I find myself using more and more simple Terminal stuff. No fancy air/earth lines, no fancy formatting, no fancy ligatures or typefaces.

planetafro 5y ago
Oddly, I'm the opposite. Working in devops and vscode, I find the visual aspect of color and logical formatting improves my work dramatically. Small tools like "bat" vs. "cat" on the terminal are great at quick data parsing for things like yaml, json, and the like. Staying old school for the sake of old school is a bit of a fallacy IMHO.
- kortex 5y ago
  I'm the same way. Why waste time reading when syntax highlighting draws your eyes to important info? Also, iTerm2 with triggers or whatever they are called? Magnifique. I have limited focus as is, if I can make mental search easier, it takes a noticeable cognitive load off.
- aniforprez 5y ago
  bat especially was a revelation. I don't think I'll ever use cat again if I can help it. I recently found exa[1] which was a bit too colorful for my taste but very nice too [1] https://github.com/ogham/exa https://github.com/ogham/exa
  - goplayoutside 5y ago
    Have you tried LSDeluxe? https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      LSD has always been a favorite for those who like to watch the pretty colours go by.
  - paavoova 5y ago
    > I don't think I'll ever use cat again if I can help it. I just tested simple concatenation and bat is over 10x slower: $ time cat 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB >/dev/null real 0m0.414s user 0m0.014s sys 0m0.400s $ time bat 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB >/dev/null real 0m4.257s user 0m1.659s sys 0m2.594s Seems like a lot of these "modern" replacements lose what the original simpler utils do well.
    - chrisdhal 5y ago
      I don't use bat as a replacement for cat, but as a replacement for less. Sure, bat can concatenate a file, but I'd say that's not the main use. The syntax coloring of file contents is my favorite use case. Line numbers and some of the other options are useful at times too. Also, I don't think I've ever needed to concatenate multiple gigabyte sized files (yes, I am sure it exists for a lot of people, but would say it's not as common as looking at a file).
    - RMPR 5y ago
      > I just tested simple concatenation and bat is over 10x slower Seems like a recurring thing[0] with the modern alternatives. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29616727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29616727
- sharikous 5y ago
  I understand you but bat, exa, etc.. have a huge downside. I have to change many platforms and systems at work and I can't be bothered to install all those new utilities in every new system. cat, ls, etc.. just work, bat has to be installed, and I have a pretty high threshold for a utility to be so vital for me that I absolutely have to install it in every Unix box I work.
  - jmconfuzeus 5y ago
    I started to keep an Ansible playbook to setup everything for me. Basically, it replaces most of the core utils with modern alternatives like like cat -> bat, grep -> ripgrep, top -> htop, and so on. That way, I don't have manually install everything for new systems or when I'm doing a clean install on one of my existing systems.
    - anchpop 5y ago
      You might enjoy looking into nix and nixos. It’s designed to make that workflow as bulletproof as possible. One of my coworkers maintains a github repo that describes his exact system, and can create a sandbox that behaves the exact same as the one he’s used to with one command (on any machine that has nix installed).
      - dotancohen 5y ago
        The problem isn't getting these tools on our own systems. The problem is getting these tools onto every box that might have to SSH into sometime.
    - ghostly_s 5y ago
      Github link?
      - jmconfuzeus 5y ago
        I haven't thought about making it public because it's just a matter of using the get_url command to download the binaries into /usr/bin and then outputting a .bashrc and /etc/bash.bashrc that contains aliases for every command like "alias cat=bat".
jonpalmisc 5y ago
I tend to agree with this. I'm not anti-formatting, but it seems that in the majority of cases, the "formatting" isn't done artfully, and actively makes it harder to read command output, etc.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  Yeah, it's the lack of taste that gets to me. Many 'modern' CLI prompts look like an emoji trashheap affixed with a lot of status information that eats up space and isn't directly actionable.
JoelEinbinder 5y ago
What’s an air/earth line?
- cturtle 5y ago
  Fancy shell prompts, often requiring patched fonts. Something like powerlevel10k[0] or starship[1] [0]: https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k [1]: https://starship.rs/ https://starship.rs/
TheCondor 5y ago
We have 5k monitors, Gpus with 12GB of RAM, fast networks, etc. color in consoles, underline, bold and italics seem overdue. What rubs me wrong is the collective halfassedness of it all. When less craps out ANSI codes, when the terminal tears and your cursor is offset because it got confused about control characters, dozens of different color configs rather than a system theme. There was this time in the Linux dark ages, red hat Linux 2 era. The enlightenment window manager was considered part of protocol GNOME, there were a lot of really exotic or organic themes, skinning was the hotness. Windows couldn’t do it. Ux be damned, if you wanted your desktop to look like some sort of demonic rune set, you could do it. Rationality, ux, consistency, etc took over. Cli skinning never seems to grow that way. I keep hoping some hacker that doesn’t know better will write a new terminal emulator, replaces ANSI codes with some minimal html and invents console css and the community embraces it.
- willm 5y ago
  It is crazy, I agree. But you have to keep in mind how old this protocol is. Layers and layers of cruft which you can trace back to before the computing era. Here is Rich running on a Teletype Model 33, circa 1963. And it works (kinda). https://twitter.com/willmcgugan/status/1476940291819069441 https://twitter.com/willmcgugan/status/1476940291819069441
  - TheCondor 5y ago
    No question, it cuts deep and we would/should look at it end to end. A big part of it is all the tty/pty black magic that we’ve just built on top of. It’s a gigantic task, but when I see new folks reimplementing “ls” as a “modern replacement” and I do find value with many of these tools (I love ripgrep and bat, among others) I hope/wish someone felt the itch to tackle this.
  - dr_zoidberg 5y ago
    > Layers and layers of cruft which you can trace back to before the computing era. Even those layers and layers don't _have to_ slow things down. Check the refterm "debacle" ([2] for the context, [0, 1] as Muratori's answer to it). It's just the way things are usually programmed doesn't care about performance and how fast things really can be. I sometimes wonder in we're not due for a massive round of optimization on a couple of the layers that we're used to using/depend on. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE [2] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
sdfgsdf 5y ago
Perhaps because you're gradually learning to distinguish what's style and what's substance?
rajandatta 5y ago
Absolutely. I still have a Terminal window open all the time to do various tasks. The ability to say 'find me x or y or z' and not having the overhead of looking through other visual clutter. Plus a few well chosen directory jump shortcuts make things easier.
yeetaccount4 5y ago
Same. I don’t even use syntax highlighting anymore. It changes how you focus. Not sure how people put up with all that powerline stuff either, or multi-line PS1s that have shit on either side. Reminds me of geocities.
csdvrx 5y ago
Personally, I find colors distracting, so I do the opposite: I use text attributes more and more, like bold, faint, underline, italics (...) even in my bash prompt Example: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/csdvrx/bash-timestamping-sqlite/main/bash-timestamping.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/csdvrx/bash-timestamping-s...
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Nope, not just you. Been coding since the 80's, and command-line tooling has become more noisy and less parser/redirect-friendly over the past decade (but option parsers have def. gotten better). To be fair, once terminals started supporting escape color codes, things started to fall apart (circa late 90's). IMHO. EDIT: Just noticed a peer comment below captures the issues with ANSI way better than I did.
gloriana 5y ago
same, it's too much to keep up with. would rather miss out at this point.
gnubison 5y ago
Exact same thing happened to me. At one point I tried out not even including $(pwd) in the prompt, and … turns out it actually works fine.

I am not sure if it's only me, but as time passes I find myself using more and more simple Terminal stuff. No fancy air/earth lines, no fancy formatting, no fancy ligatures or typefaces.

planetafro 5y ago

Oddly, I'm the opposite. Working in devops and vscode, I find the visual aspect of color and logical formatting improves my work dramatically. Small tools like "bat" vs. "cat" on the terminal are great at quick data parsing for things like yaml, json, and the like. Staying old school for the sake of old school is a bit of a fallacy IMHO.

kortex 5y ago
I'm the same way. Why waste time reading when syntax highlighting draws your eyes to important info? Also, iTerm2 with triggers or whatever they are called? Magnifique. I have limited focus as is, if I can make mental search easier, it takes a noticeable cognitive load off.
aniforprez 5y ago
bat especially was a revelation. I don't think I'll ever use cat again if I can help it. I recently found exa[1] which was a bit too colorful for my taste but very nice too [1] https://github.com/ogham/exa https://github.com/ogham/exa
- goplayoutside 5y ago
  Have you tried LSDeluxe? https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    LSD has always been a favorite for those who like to watch the pretty colours go by.
- paavoova 5y ago
  > I don't think I'll ever use cat again if I can help it. I just tested simple concatenation and bat is over 10x slower: $ time cat 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB >/dev/null real 0m0.414s user 0m0.014s sys 0m0.400s $ time bat 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB >/dev/null real 0m4.257s user 0m1.659s sys 0m2.594s Seems like a lot of these "modern" replacements lose what the original simpler utils do well.
  - chrisdhal 5y ago
    I don't use bat as a replacement for cat, but as a replacement for less. Sure, bat can concatenate a file, but I'd say that's not the main use. The syntax coloring of file contents is my favorite use case. Line numbers and some of the other options are useful at times too. Also, I don't think I've ever needed to concatenate multiple gigabyte sized files (yes, I am sure it exists for a lot of people, but would say it's not as common as looking at a file).
  - RMPR 5y ago
    > I just tested simple concatenation and bat is over 10x slower Seems like a recurring thing[0] with the modern alternatives. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29616727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29616727
sharikous 5y ago
I understand you but bat, exa, etc.. have a huge downside. I have to change many platforms and systems at work and I can't be bothered to install all those new utilities in every new system. cat, ls, etc.. just work, bat has to be installed, and I have a pretty high threshold for a utility to be so vital for me that I absolutely have to install it in every Unix box I work.
- jmconfuzeus 5y ago
  I started to keep an Ansible playbook to setup everything for me. Basically, it replaces most of the core utils with modern alternatives like like cat -> bat, grep -> ripgrep, top -> htop, and so on. That way, I don't have manually install everything for new systems or when I'm doing a clean install on one of my existing systems.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    You might enjoy looking into nix and nixos. It’s designed to make that workflow as bulletproof as possible. One of my coworkers maintains a github repo that describes his exact system, and can create a sandbox that behaves the exact same as the one he’s used to with one command (on any machine that has nix installed).
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      The problem isn't getting these tools on our own systems. The problem is getting these tools onto every box that might have to SSH into sometime.
  - ghostly_s 5y ago
    Github link?
    - jmconfuzeus 5y ago
      I haven't thought about making it public because it's just a matter of using the get_url command to download the binaries into /usr/bin and then outputting a .bashrc and /etc/bash.bashrc that contains aliases for every command like "alias cat=bat".

jonpalmisc 5y ago

I tend to agree with this. I'm not anti-formatting, but it seems that in the majority of cases, the "formatting" isn't done artfully, and actively makes it harder to read command output, etc.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago
Yeah, it's the lack of taste that gets to me. Many 'modern' CLI prompts look like an emoji trashheap affixed with a lot of status information that eats up space and isn't directly actionable.

JoelEinbinder 5y ago

What’s an air/earth line?

cturtle 5y ago
Fancy shell prompts, often requiring patched fonts. Something like powerlevel10k[0] or starship[1] [0]: https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k [1]: https://starship.rs/ https://starship.rs/

TheCondor 5y ago

We have 5k monitors, Gpus with 12GB of RAM, fast networks, etc. color in consoles, underline, bold and italics seem overdue. What rubs me wrong is the collective halfassedness of it all. When less craps out ANSI codes, when the terminal tears and your cursor is offset because it got confused about control characters, dozens of different color configs rather than a system theme. There was this time in the Linux dark ages, red hat Linux 2 era. The enlightenment window manager was considered part of protocol GNOME, there were a lot of really exotic or organic themes, skinning was the hotness. Windows couldn’t do it. Ux be damned, if you wanted your desktop to look like some sort of demonic rune set, you could do it. Rationality, ux, consistency, etc took over. Cli skinning never seems to grow that way. I keep hoping some hacker that doesn’t know better will write a new terminal emulator, replaces ANSI codes with some minimal html and invents console css and the community embraces it.

willm 5y ago
It is crazy, I agree. But you have to keep in mind how old this protocol is. Layers and layers of cruft which you can trace back to before the computing era. Here is Rich running on a Teletype Model 33, circa 1963. And it works (kinda). https://twitter.com/willmcgugan/status/1476940291819069441 https://twitter.com/willmcgugan/status/1476940291819069441
- TheCondor 5y ago
  No question, it cuts deep and we would/should look at it end to end. A big part of it is all the tty/pty black magic that we’ve just built on top of. It’s a gigantic task, but when I see new folks reimplementing “ls” as a “modern replacement” and I do find value with many of these tools (I love ripgrep and bat, among others) I hope/wish someone felt the itch to tackle this.
- dr_zoidberg 5y ago
  > Layers and layers of cruft which you can trace back to before the computing era. Even those layers and layers don't _have to_ slow things down. Check the refterm "debacle" ([2] for the context, [0, 1] as Muratori's answer to it). It's just the way things are usually programmed doesn't care about performance and how fast things really can be. I sometimes wonder in we're not due for a massive round of optimization on a couple of the layers that we're used to using/depend on. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE [2] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

sdfgsdf 5y ago

Perhaps because you're gradually learning to distinguish what's style and what's substance?

rajandatta 5y ago

Absolutely. I still have a Terminal window open all the time to do various tasks. The ability to say 'find me x or y or z' and not having the overhead of looking through other visual clutter. Plus a few well chosen directory jump shortcuts make things easier.

yeetaccount4 5y ago

Same. I don’t even use syntax highlighting anymore. It changes how you focus. Not sure how people put up with all that powerline stuff either, or multi-line PS1s that have shit on either side. Reminds me of geocities.

csdvrx 5y ago

Personally, I find colors distracting, so I do the opposite: I use text attributes more and more, like bold, faint, underline, italics (...) even in my bash prompt Example: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/csdvrx/bash-timestamping-sqlite/main/bash-timestamping.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/csdvrx/bash-timestamping-s...

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Nope, not just you. Been coding since the 80's, and command-line tooling has become more noisy and less parser/redirect-friendly over the past decade (but option parsers have def. gotten better). To be fair, once terminals started supporting escape color codes, things started to fall apart (circa late 90's). IMHO. EDIT: Just noticed a peer comment below captures the issues with ANSI way better than I did.

gloriana 5y ago

same, it's too much to keep up with. would rather miss out at this point.

gnubison 5y ago

Exact same thing happened to me. At one point I tried out not even including $(pwd) in the prompt, and … turns out it actually works fine.