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"When I first started using tmux, I felt overwhelmed by the very poor default UI that it offers and the amount of options and shortcuts that I needed to know to
by akkartik 1y ago
"When I first started using tmux, I felt overwhelmed by the very poor default UI that it offers and the amount of options and shortcuts that I needed to know to operate it well and be productive. It took me several tries before I started to feel more or less comfortable with it. One of the things that stood out to me right away was how dreadful UI looked. Not only it felt uninviting, but it almost felt “gatekeepy” - if you don’t know how to use it in this configuration, then might as well forget about it."
EPendragon elaborate on this. It seems like you understand the shell enough to use it productively and customize it to be how you like it. The screenshot this quote is talking about looks like a shell? In what way is it dreadful, and in what way do your customizations make it not dreadful?
For example, it seems like a valid criticism that shells are not very discoverable and a prompt and blinking cursor can be intimidating to a noob, and that surely applies to tmux as well. But then changing the shortcuts doesn't really address that, does it?
To me it seems your article is either saying, "tmux is a pig, and here's me putting some lipstick on it," :) or the problems are not insurmountable, and the solutions are nice but not life-changing.
It's great that you like it better now, and we're all having fun chatting around it about how we configure our tools here on the Hacker News :) But I don't see why it's "dreadful". It's just.. computers, no? Tmux seems no more gatekeepy than any other aspect of computers. And I say this as someone who stopped using tmux a few years ago after getting super annoyed with it.
- EPendragon 1y agoHey, akkartik! The initial experience where I saw a lot of elements on the screen without knowing what's what was a lot. And sure enough - a lot of it had to do with just learning how it works and what's what. But in addition to the UI that is unintuitive for the beginner, most of the keybindings either didn't make sense or were not convenient (talking about prefix). For example, splitting panes in my opinion are much better done with | and - symbols rather than " and %. I can see what they were going for with double quotes and the percent sign, but IMO vertical line and a hyphen make more sense. I do not need to be actively thinking about which one should I use for a vertical vs horizontal split. There was some aspect of "putting a lipstick on it" - for sure. Making it more pleasant to look at didn't improve function - just looks. I just think making your tools look the way you like and enjoy them will create a more pleasant experience and help you learn the tool faster too. The dreadfulness did come from not understanding it completely and being a noob early on. Fixing the style and function also put me into a process of being intentional about learning how the tool works and adjusting things that I didn't like. And you're right - it is not more gatekeepy that other tools per se. I was simply describing my experience and what I ended doing about that.
- akkartik 1y agoThanks! I'm glad I asked, because there does seem something here I can learn from. I care very much about what makes a power tool with a high ceiling gatekeepy. What were the "lot of elements" in the screenshot? Ignoring shell stuff, is it the bar at the bottom? Is it the "[0]" and the "0:bash*"? The "Macbook-pro" might seem familiar to someone familiar to the shell, who is used to seeing it in the prompt of an uncustomized shell. The date and time likewise seem obvious what they mean. Am I missing anything? I think the keybindings being non-mnemonic there's only so much you can do about. Vim's hjkl were mnemonic on the VT-100 terminal, but keybindings outlast mortal hardware. So the ability to rebind is in some ways the best you can get IMO. Zooming out, the best power UI I've been able to come up with is a combination of a Wordstar-like always-on menu showing common keybindings, and a command palette. Here are a couple of UIs I've made, I'm curious what you think of them: https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/108766067153506592 https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/108766067153506592 https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/html/20210624-shell.png https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/html/20210624-shell...
- zem 1y agodon't know if you used lotus 123 back in the day, but it was one of the best keyboard-driven interfaces i've seen. everything was done by navigating hierarchical menus, but the menus were displayed horizontally in a bar on the bottom of the screen, no popups to obscure the rest of the display. so if you were a power user you would just automatically type e.g. /fs to open the file menu and then the save option thereunder, but if you were new to it you could look down, see that /f was file and when you hit that the bar would change to include s:save and you could hit that.