5 ms·

This is a nice setup. It's got tmux and fzf and rg and zoxide and clean-looking nvim. I'd recommend atuin, starship, bat, glow, duf, dogdns, viddy, gum/sesh, du

This is a nice setup. It's got tmux and fzf and rg and zoxide and clean-looking nvim. I'd recommend atuin, starship, bat, glow, duf, dogdns, viddy, gum/sesh, dust, btop et all if you don't have them, there's a long tail. The Awesome Terminal XYZ lists on Github have them all. atuin is make-or-break, its a bigger deal than zoxide and being a coder without zoxide is like being an athlete with shoes for a different sport. asciinema is a better way to do terminal videos. Its weird that this is weird now: having your tools wired in used to be called "being a programmer". VSCode and Zed and Cursor and shit are useful additions to the toolbox, you gotta know that stuff by heart now too and you have to know which LLM to use for what, but these things are the new minimum, they aren't a replacement for anything. Even with Claude Code running hot at 4am when the PID controller is wide open, sometimes its going to trash your tree (and if it doesnt youve got it on too short a leash to be faster than gptel) and without magit? gl. If you think you're faster than OP with stock Cursor? Get them to make a video of how to use an LLM with chops.

kragen 1y ago
Being a programmer is not about configuring your development environment. It never has been. I know a relatively accomplished programmer whose preferred development environment is Unix with the ex editor, and plenty of beginners whose whizbang IDEs completely fail to compensate for their lack of understanding. That's not to say that tooling doesn't matter at all. Just that, historically, it's been a relatively minor factor. Maybe LLMs have changed that, or are about to. An athlete with shoes for a different sport might run 5% slower. In a winner-takes-all competitive environment, that's fatal; a sprinter that ran 5% slower than the gold medalist is just another loser. Most programmers, however, win by collaboration, and on a relatively smooth fitness landscape, not a winner-takes-all spike. Even in winner-takes-all regions like startups, failure always results from bigger errors. I think nobody has ever said, "My startup would have succeeded if we'd used Dvorak keyboards instead of QWERTY", or vim instead of VSCode, or vice versa. It's always things like feuding cofounders, loss of motivation, never finding product-market fit, etc.
- deafpolygon 1y ago
  Refreshing to see logic among the sea of your shell "bros".
- smlavine 1y ago
  Being a programmer is absolutely about knowing how to configure your development environment, though.
- benreesman 1y ago
  I find this line of argument really weird. Obviously mastering his tools is only one of many things required of a master craftsman, but the relentless pursuit of excellence in all dimensions of ones craft is the minimum possible criteria for ever attaining it, almost tautologically. It's like when people complain that leetcode is nothing like the job: yeah, it's a pretty bad test, but you're making a bad argument about that because CS knowledge is extremely relevant to the job, unless the job is assembly-line library composition. I've consulted for companies that had all their dev boxes on coder or something, and you get really good at vscode really fast or you don't have much luck. It's more than 5%, but even stipulating that it's 5%, whoa, 5 percent?! By installing a bunch of stuff off a list on GitHub and dropping some aliases in your bashrc or zshrc? in a few weeks you're five percent more effective? Anyone in any field from banking to bioinformatics would think you were joking or a scam artist if you offered them 5% more efficient outcomes at that price. Regarding OG editors like ed and ex and sam and stuff? I can absolutely believe that someone with a lifetime mastery of one of those tools could smoke a VSCode user, it's not at all obvious that VSCode is an upgrade to vim/etc. along any dimension other than low barrier to entry. ditto emacs which is about 1000x more powerful than vscode and the difference in library/extension ecosystem is not measured by size: the emacs one is identical to the vscode one with bottom 90% by quality sliced off the vscode one. And this stuff compounds, you get a bit better at the tools and you can read more code faster, read the right code faster, start moving the derivative of the derivative. It's also extremely non-obvious that collaboration at the kinds of scales and complexities that make exceptional skills or experience in it a top 3-5 core competency for people doing most software. Study after study going back to Fred Brooks and the Mythical Man Month have demonstrated that relatively small teams of people who get along very well coordinated by a relatively small number of highly technical managers who take the offload on the high-complexity cross-org collaboration is the golden ticket. It's the same reason computers have dedicated routing tables in the NIC and that those things talk to even bigger and more specialized machines that do all routing all day: you don't want to scale O(n^M) with the communication overhead. A hacker needs to work really well with their immediate team, and have a good dialog with a manager who is both technical (to understand the work) and who devotes a lot of energy to complex collaboration.
tmountain 1y ago
Nice list of commands. I would add fd (author: sharkdp) to the list. It’s a find replacement, and it has great ergonomics. Also, atuin is probably the single biggest upgrade to my cli. It helps me dig up esoteric incantations that I ran six months ago with ease.
- benreesman 1y ago
  +1 fd, use it all the time.
groby_b 1y ago
I think you're overindexing on tools. A good dev can produce excellent results rapidly in an entirely "naked" environment. Sure, good tools might help, but you're looking at improvements in the margins - and a lot of this is about your personal joy, not productivity. If the rate at which you generate value is noticeably gated by which IDE you use... well, you've got a long and exciting journey ahead of you. It's going to be fun, and I don't mean that facetiously. "knowing your tools" was never called "being a programmer". Best devs I've ever worked with all did absolutely amazing work with more/grep/vi and a lot of thinking. And the thinking is where the value was created. That's still true, even if you throw an LLM into the mix.
- benreesman 1y ago
  I completely agree that being comfortable with basic tools is critical to a versatile software professional because you're routinely in situations where you don't have your kit with you, for every tool on that list there is a GNU userland equivalent that's had basically the same core behavior since the 90s and I switched from DOS and Windows to Linux and GNU, and I am routinely glad that I know how to write useful `find` and `awk` and all that because I'm trying to get some box brought up. I'm not knocking the classic tooling, it was designed by geniuses who obsessed about tools and tools that build tools (everyone from Ken Thompson to John Carmack are on the record about the importance of tooling). It's the stock VSCode and Cursor people with an extension or two that are accepting a totally voluntary handicap. Someone in the thread called me a "shell bro", and I mean, that's just asking to get rocked if it's ever on the line against someone serious.
zahlman 1y ago
> It's got tmux and fzf and rg and zoxide and clean-looking nvim. I'd recommend atuin, starship, bat, glow, duf, dogdns, viddy, gum/sesh, dust, btop While I get your point, please consider how absurd this sounds to someone who doesn't recognize most of the names.
- yard2010 1y ago
  Few hours later, 2 of these tools are in the front page of hackernews. So it's not that absurd! Sometimes you can just reference stuff here in the comments in order to summon them. I love this place.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > Sometimes you can just reference stuff here in the comments in order to summon them. I know. It was more a commentary on how whimsical and uninformative all the names are.

kragen 1y ago

Being a programmer is not about configuring your development environment. It never has been. I know a relatively accomplished programmer whose preferred development environment is Unix with the ex editor, and plenty of beginners whose whizbang IDEs completely fail to compensate for their lack of understanding. That's not to say that tooling doesn't matter at all. Just that, historically, it's been a relatively minor factor. Maybe LLMs have changed that, or are about to. An athlete with shoes for a different sport might run 5% slower. In a winner-takes-all competitive environment, that's fatal; a sprinter that ran 5% slower than the gold medalist is just another loser. Most programmers, however, win by collaboration, and on a relatively smooth fitness landscape, not a winner-takes-all spike. Even in winner-takes-all regions like startups, failure always results from bigger errors. I think nobody has ever said, "My startup would have succeeded if we'd used Dvorak keyboards instead of QWERTY", or vim instead of VSCode, or vice versa. It's always things like feuding cofounders, loss of motivation, never finding product-market fit, etc.

deafpolygon 1y ago
Refreshing to see logic among the sea of your shell "bros".
smlavine 1y ago
Being a programmer is absolutely about knowing how to configure your development environment, though.
benreesman 1y ago
I find this line of argument really weird. Obviously mastering his tools is only one of many things required of a master craftsman, but the relentless pursuit of excellence in all dimensions of ones craft is the minimum possible criteria for ever attaining it, almost tautologically. It's like when people complain that leetcode is nothing like the job: yeah, it's a pretty bad test, but you're making a bad argument about that because CS knowledge is extremely relevant to the job, unless the job is assembly-line library composition. I've consulted for companies that had all their dev boxes on coder or something, and you get really good at vscode really fast or you don't have much luck. It's more than 5%, but even stipulating that it's 5%, whoa, 5 percent?! By installing a bunch of stuff off a list on GitHub and dropping some aliases in your bashrc or zshrc? in a few weeks you're five percent more effective? Anyone in any field from banking to bioinformatics would think you were joking or a scam artist if you offered them 5% more efficient outcomes at that price. Regarding OG editors like ed and ex and sam and stuff? I can absolutely believe that someone with a lifetime mastery of one of those tools could smoke a VSCode user, it's not at all obvious that VSCode is an upgrade to vim/etc. along any dimension other than low barrier to entry. ditto emacs which is about 1000x more powerful than vscode and the difference in library/extension ecosystem is not measured by size: the emacs one is identical to the vscode one with bottom 90% by quality sliced off the vscode one. And this stuff compounds, you get a bit better at the tools and you can read more code faster, read the right code faster, start moving the derivative of the derivative. It's also extremely non-obvious that collaboration at the kinds of scales and complexities that make exceptional skills or experience in it a top 3-5 core competency for people doing most software. Study after study going back to Fred Brooks and the Mythical Man Month have demonstrated that relatively small teams of people who get along very well coordinated by a relatively small number of highly technical managers who take the offload on the high-complexity cross-org collaboration is the golden ticket. It's the same reason computers have dedicated routing tables in the NIC and that those things talk to even bigger and more specialized machines that do all routing all day: you don't want to scale O(n^M) with the communication overhead. A hacker needs to work really well with their immediate team, and have a good dialog with a manager who is both technical (to understand the work) and who devotes a lot of energy to complex collaboration.

tmountain 1y ago

Nice list of commands. I would add fd (author: sharkdp) to the list. It’s a find replacement, and it has great ergonomics. Also, atuin is probably the single biggest upgrade to my cli. It helps me dig up esoteric incantations that I ran six months ago with ease.

benreesman 1y ago
+1 fd, use it all the time.

groby_b 1y ago

I think you're overindexing on tools. A good dev can produce excellent results rapidly in an entirely "naked" environment. Sure, good tools might help, but you're looking at improvements in the margins - and a lot of this is about your personal joy, not productivity. If the rate at which you generate value is noticeably gated by which IDE you use... well, you've got a long and exciting journey ahead of you. It's going to be fun, and I don't mean that facetiously. "knowing your tools" was never called "being a programmer". Best devs I've ever worked with all did absolutely amazing work with more/grep/vi and a lot of thinking. And the thinking is where the value was created. That's still true, even if you throw an LLM into the mix.

benreesman 1y ago
I completely agree that being comfortable with basic tools is critical to a versatile software professional because you're routinely in situations where you don't have your kit with you, for every tool on that list there is a GNU userland equivalent that's had basically the same core behavior since the 90s and I switched from DOS and Windows to Linux and GNU, and I am routinely glad that I know how to write useful `find` and `awk` and all that because I'm trying to get some box brought up. I'm not knocking the classic tooling, it was designed by geniuses who obsessed about tools and tools that build tools (everyone from Ken Thompson to John Carmack are on the record about the importance of tooling). It's the stock VSCode and Cursor people with an extension or two that are accepting a totally voluntary handicap. Someone in the thread called me a "shell bro", and I mean, that's just asking to get rocked if it's ever on the line against someone serious.

zahlman 1y ago

> It's got tmux and fzf and rg and zoxide and clean-looking nvim. I'd recommend atuin, starship, bat, glow, duf, dogdns, viddy, gum/sesh, dust, btop While I get your point, please consider how absurd this sounds to someone who doesn't recognize most of the names.

yard2010 1y ago
Few hours later, 2 of these tools are in the front page of hackernews. So it's not that absurd! Sometimes you can just reference stuff here in the comments in order to summon them. I love this place.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > Sometimes you can just reference stuff here in the comments in order to summon them. I know. It was more a commentary on how whimsical and uninformative all the names are.