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This is not an argument for unchanging tools. It's an argument for becoming a power user. Pick good, powerful, customizable tools. When they were made is immate

This is not an argument for unchanging tools. It's an argument for becoming a power user. Pick good, powerful, customizable tools. When they were made is immaterial. Learn them to expert level. The "innovations" toolmakers try to push on you will almost never be worth the cost of losing all your knowledge, customization to your uses, and muscle memory.

qayxc 4y ago
I honestly fail to see how using a different terminal, typing "spell word", looking through a list of suggestions and then entering a number followed by another keypress to copy said word into the clipboard and finally pasting the the result where I actually want it - all providing I actually know and notice potential spelling mistakes - is in any way shape or form superior to a system that highlights spelling mistakes automatically and presents fixes with a single click. > Pick good, powerful, customizable tools. In other words: know ahead of time what you need and how to achieve it efficiently. Discoverability on the command line is atrocious, which might be the reason it feels like such an achievement to finally learn that "tr" stands for "translate or delete characters" or how obscure command line options of grep or cut work to massage text files. > The "innovations" toolmakers try to push on you will almost never be worth the cost of losing all your knowledge, customization to your uses, and muscle memory. One could just as well argue that the mental resources and time needed to acquire these specialised skills are better spent to solve actual problems as opposed to do the same thing over and over again manually (otherwise they won't become "muscle memory") using archaic tools designed for completely different systems. There's another side to the story and I remember vividly that programmers in the late 1980s and early 1990s argued the exact same way when defending their continued use of assembly language versus high level languages.

qayxc 4y ago

I honestly fail to see how using a different terminal, typing "spell word", looking through a list of suggestions and then entering a number followed by another keypress to copy said word into the clipboard and finally pasting the the result where I actually want it - all providing I actually know and notice potential spelling mistakes - is in any way shape or form superior to a system that highlights spelling mistakes automatically and presents fixes with a single click. > Pick good, powerful, customizable tools. In other words: know ahead of time what you need and how to achieve it efficiently. Discoverability on the command line is atrocious, which might be the reason it feels like such an achievement to finally learn that "tr" stands for "translate or delete characters" or how obscure command line options of grep or cut work to massage text files. > The "innovations" toolmakers try to push on you will almost never be worth the cost of losing all your knowledge, customization to your uses, and muscle memory. One could just as well argue that the mental resources and time needed to acquire these specialised skills are better spent to solve actual problems as opposed to do the same thing over and over again manually (otherwise they won't become "muscle memory") using archaic tools designed for completely different systems. There's another side to the story and I remember vividly that programmers in the late 1980s and early 1990s argued the exact same way when defending their continued use of assembly language versus high level languages.