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>Is anyone else Yes. Minor thing but I find this sort of passive aggressive framing more irritating as I've gotten older and crustier. You're on a global netwo
by xoa 5y ago
>Is anyone else
Yes. Minor thing but I find this sort of passive aggressive framing more irritating as I've gotten older and crustier. You're on a global network of billions. No matter what it is about something with as much uptake and variation as shells or millions of other things, of course there are definitely other people doing the same as you. Rather than a kind of silly/weird seeking of validation just assert what you do and why. It's particularly galling when yes you're probably in the flat out majority overall, defaults are powerful and there are almost certainly a lot more people who just dip into shells once in a long while and never customize a single thing than who go even as far as you do.
>mostly rolling with the zsh (not oh-my-zsh) defaults?
You could ask the same thing about all sorts of powerful tools and environments, from powerful CLI tools (not just shell but Vim or Emacs) to CAD and graphics programs which are famously adaptable, and the answer is always that it's a matter of an individual finding their comfort place on a spectrum of tradeoffs between ease of moving between environments and meta-work cost vs future efficiency/comfort benefits. The more one customizes to their exact needs, the more fragile the environment in moving across systems (efforts in portable environments can help on the technical side though they're not a panacea, but even that won't help with just plain not being allowed to customize a remote work area). It also means when outside of the heavily customized environment productivity may drop quite a bit, a lot of muscle memory goes to things which aren't there. It also takes meta-effort, time and resources spent on improving tools themselves rather then using the tools to do the desired tasks one reaches for the tools in the first place. Of course, some level of effort is required by any specialist to learn at least standard tooling and knowledge, but rarely is mastery of a tool an end in and of itself vs a means to do something else with said tool. Ideally there should be a positive ROI on time invested vs making that back later, but that won't necessarily be the case with something rarely used or where needs are basic.
Conversely though customization, getting really comfortable with the full power of automation computers offer and knowing how to rapidly match that to any new work can have major productivity boosts down the road. And sometimes give new perspectives on the edge cases and other tooling that is useful anyway, as well as just plain make things better fit individual needs and senses. And some people just don't move beyond their own environments much, or are valued specialists who would be allowed to bring their own environments and tool chains with them at any new job (encouraged/expected to even, that's part of the productivity they're being hired for).
No right answer to that now anymore than there was 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Personally I'm more towards the customization end of the spectrum when it comes to shell and general CLI environment, I'm not doing a lot on machines I don't at least have user environmental control over vs my own systems, and I've been happy to sink the time into really shaping zsh and other utilities to what I want. But I'm not nearly as far along as a range of other people either and I can certainly see the attraction of just using the standard stuff (and I do do that more in other areas than when I was younger too). Deviation has a cost and it's worth giving a bit of thought as to whether the cost is worth it. So nothing wrong at all with using something pure vanilla or close to it. But on HN in particular shouldn't be surprising if a lot of us do a fair amount of tweaking. And then search for a way to make that reproducible, sharable and clean to work with same as any other "software project", which leads in turn to various frameworks and such to help with that.
- jrm4 5y agoPassive aggressive is a super weird accusation here. Having read a ton of (and posted a few) "does anyone else" type responses generally, I fail to see why they should be read as anything other genuine curiosity as well as conversation openers, perhaps to tweak said flow.
- nickjj 5y ago> perhaps to tweak said flow. Yeah, that was the goal of my opener. I'm happy with my set up but there's always "unknown unknowns". I use like 50 Vim plugins but never felt the urge to add more functionality to my shell because it feels great as is with just the 2 I mentioned. I was hoping maybe someone would suggest something really useful that I wasn't aware of.
- toastercat 5y agoPersonally, I'm more peeved by the "am I the only one" framing.
- jrm4 5y agoBut why? Again, not unreasonable to start a conversation like this? "It feels like a whole lot of people are doing something in way X, but I like way Y, which seems simpler and more obvious to me?"
- xoa 5y agoUpvoted this and all the others, including OP's sibling comment. I hope nobody downvotes anyone either way, and I should have put that at the end vs in order since it's just my own feeling on the phrase and it wasn't like this post in particular was in any way a particularly egregious example, just one of those straws on the camel's back that happened to get to me. Apologies to nickjj. But I don't agree with you that the phrase can't be read to have those connotations in general, and it feels like it's been becoming more frequent. >"Am I the only one out of billions of humans who does a obviously pretty common thing" (like sticking to default values which by definition are default because whomever set them thought they were a decent starting place) kind of feels irritating the more I see it vs some sort of >"Does the effort in setting this up and number of moving parts/dependencies it adds really justify itself, or is it more for fun/learning? I'm quite satisfied with my [vanilla+ setup], what does this bring to the table and at what point is it worth sinking more into these tools if ever?" or even >"Though this and similar projects are interesting I think most including myself are better served staying as close to defaults as possible." 100% though: this may all be subjective subculture and learning. I can see how it could be treated as an innocent opening phrase, just a form without any deeper meaning. It rubs me the wrong way though anyway, there is a defensiveness about it. Like even, what if you were the only one? So what? You can still be right for yourself anyway. How many other people are that way or not seems both peripheral and distracting (bringing in social pressure) from the meat of it. Anyway, Sunday morning HN procrastinating from fighting with getting some crufty old infrastructure running on a new vm platform! Very genuine apologies as well that picking on that nit clearly irritated a bunch of other people in turn! There was nothing wrong with the question content, it's certainly something I've grappled with and not always well in either direction. In the past I've spent way too much time diving deep into things that I barely ever used later, or conversely cruising along for years without fully learning a tool that could have saved me enormous time by automating stuff I did manually. I know there is advice along the lines of "if you find yourself doing this tiresome manual task for the Nth time now it's time to figure out how to automate it" or even tools that themselves track your usage like the open source ActivityWatch [0]. Run that for a year and see where your time is going. I never learned or did any of that early on though and still struggle with the tradeoffs there. ---- 0: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/ https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/