13 ms·
Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)
- vzaliva 10mo agocommon theme: tiled layout, terminals, minimum fancy decorations.
- ajross 10mo agoI think I see only one truly tiled layout. But yes, "terminals and editors" as the core developer workflow is extremely conserved over time. It dates from the mid 80's on Sun 2's and really hasn't changed much in four decades. It's probably not worth arguing whether this is the "best" when compared with vscode+LSP+Claude or whatever happens to be en vogue in the moment. But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Those of us in the cult aren't observed to leave the compound except in extremely rare circumstances. I'll be doing the same stuff on my death bed, likely.
- bigstrat2003 10mo ago> But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Optimal for those users, at any rate. IMO using a terminal editor is so painful compared to a decent GUI (Sublime or even VSCode) that I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would choose such a tool. I just try to repeat the mantra of "everyone likes different things" and stop trying to understand something where I likely never will get it.
- someguyiguess 10mo agoIt’s funny. I thought the same thing before taking the time to become familiar with VIM keybindings and now I find VS Code tedious and painfully slow.
- markus_zhang 10mo agoI guess once one gets used to it or anything it’s going to be more productive than the rest of the tools.
- skydhash 10mo agoTake about anything from a standard GUI editor. In a terminal editor, they are also easily accessible. And more easily accessible (if not discoverable). But one of the major gain is how close your shell is. A lot of editors allows to start a cli tool and optionally send a portion of the current buffer as input to it. You may also be able to include the output in some buffer too. Some GUI editors allows that, but it's almost always a config maze and you're never sure of the environment in which it does run the commands. Also in a terminal environment, all you enter are keyboard keys. If you know how to touch-type, your cognitive load can be greatly reduced (personal feeling). You can also navigate something like sublime with keyboard only. But it's way more tiresome.
- myaccountonhn 10mo agoFor me its how easy it is to extend. Kakoune makes it so easy to integrate with the rest of my system. I can often create any kind of integration I need with just 1-10 lines of code. In vscode I need to just hope that someone else built the integration I need as a plugin, because writing plugins is really painful.
- LAC-Tech 10mo agowhat's difficult about it? I have auto complete, LSP, format on save for may languages, fuzzy finding. my neovim config file is 355 lines, with comments and line breaks.
- iberator 10mo agoNormal, good editors are great already with 0 line config. That's the whole point.
- zahlman 10mo agoTerminal editors generally do support the mouse, and there are occasions where even a fairly skilled user of a good terminal editor will find it easier to click to set an insertion point than use commands to reach it. But having those key-command options greatly enhances the experience. You need to watch the screen while a skilled user edits text to get it. It's like magic. I haven't picked up nearly as much as I'd like, but even basics (requiring zero config) are way beyond what I could easily do in any GUI editor I ever experienced. For example, in vim, if you are on a bracket or parenthesis (open or close) in edit mode, it is three keystrokes to delete the entire bracketed portion, precisely, regardless of size (even if the matching bracket is off screen). Finding the matching bracket with the mouse is often hell. And it's not as hard to learn as you may expect, because those keystrokes are not magic codes; they're part of a consistent, thoughtfully designed command language. You choose a mode for selecting text (character based, with lowercase v), use "motions" to select the text in that mode (in this case, a single "go to the matching bracket" motion, which is the percent sign), and take an action with that selection (delete it, with d).
- Nextgrid 10mo agoI wonder if there's a worthwhile time-saving in aggregate? To me it seems like overall the bottleneck is always thinking what code to write/edit, not the actual edition. So I'm not convinced shaving a couple seconds here and there outweighs the benefit of a modern IDE or offsets the time spent ricing such a setup.
- ajross 10mo agoSeems like the opposite to me. IDE fashion changes like the wind. "Normal developers" are constantly starting over with new tools and new paradigms every time they start work on a new project. Gotta have the right vscode extensions to flash your firmware, IT only supports IntelliJ on the new job, ad infinitum. It's been this way for decades. My .emacs file gets updated regularly, sure, but it's thirty years old, and my basic flow hasn't changed.
- zahlman 10mo ago> To me it seems like overall the bottleneck is always thinking what code to write/edit I feel the same way. But small advantages compound to at least some extent (see e.g. https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/ https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/); and I find that noticing that it takes more time than I'd like to write/edit something, risks breaking my flow.
- bluecalm 10mo agoI've came across Mitchell Hashimoto (founder and main programmer behind Hashi Corp and now Ghostty) saying that he uses bare VIM and it took him long time to even use auto formatter with it. He also said that the way for him to explore APIs is to read the docs first :)
- omnicognate 10mo agoAnd that hasn't changed much since. At work and at home, I'm usually looking at emacs with no tab or menu bar, full screen on all monitors, with everything else (browser, etc) a virtual desktop switch away: exwm at home, one terminal emacsclient in ssh per monitor with a single daemon on linux server (accessed from Windows) at work. With many minor variations this is how my desktop has looked since my first programming job, which coincidentally was in 2002, but the details of the setup have changed a lot. The bit that has remained constant is that all I want on my monitor(s) when I'm programming is code. Edit: Probably the most visible change is better fonts and font rendering. Edit 2: To expand on "all I want is code": let's say there is a menu bar with maybe 10 menus and 100 or so items, and a project navigator thingy, and a compiler output window. I would much rather these things not take up permanent space on my screen. Every one of them shows information/commands that I can access with a key combination and in some cases some fuzzy completion after hitting a key combination. Any decent editor can do this and you can learn it in an afternoon, and if you're going to spend the next couple of decades in front of it it's worth getting rid of the pixels permanently allocated to advertising "you can do this thing".
- gentooflux 10mo agoRMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
- DANmode 10mo agoHe’s…something.
- bigyabai 10mo agoThe Trisquel website has some screenshots. The 7.0 LTS is from 2014 so it's likely he was probably running something like this: https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots
- nighthawk454 10mo agoOn the contrary, I think that was a wonderful answer and reflects the POV well. Hard to imagine something more Stallman-esque!
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago"I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star.
- jsk2600 10mo agoThis is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall: > For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
- krackers 10mo agoThis makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it. For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
- jasoneckert 10mo agoI echo this. My desktop has stayed virtually unchanged for decades, and in retrospect, it explains why I use the Sway tiling window manager today.
- Zambyte 10mo agoWhat are you echoing?
- jsk2600 10mo agoMostly tiling WMs and terminals
- Towaway69 10mo agoI remember those days, Fvwm2[1] was brilliant with its multiple screens and controlling the mouse using arrow keys - good times. Amazingly difficult to config even if you could get Xconfig to support your setup (external refresh rates and supported screen sizes and drivers for video cards). But over the years I've come to appreciate the simplicity of Mac. Initially it didn't even have multiple screens but you could install (I forget the name) an application that simulated the multiple screens of Fvwm2. Right from the start I was glad for the simplicity of just having everything work or it wasn't supported - there was no in-between. Today I'm using Spaces with iTerm2 and Emacs as core development tools. Not much different from my Fvwm2, xterm and Emacs in xterm solution from 25 years ago. Pity really that nothing has fundamentally changed in code development. [1]: https://www.fvwm.org/ https://www.fvwm.org/
- climb_stealth 10mo agoHah, If you ask my partner, I've been looking at the same screen for years and years
- qingcharles 10mo agoMine is unchanged since I switched from DOS (Borland) to Windows (Visual C++/Visual Studio) development in 1995. If I sat 1995 me down in front of my PC it wouldn't take more than a couple of mins to figure everything out. He'd be confused about all the AI panes on the dev apps, though, I suspect. (I've also never had a window tiled in my life; every window maximized at all times to avoid noise)
- Retr0id 10mo agoLinus Torvalds currently uses Fedora with GNOME, which was fun to learn because that's also been my personal choice for a while now. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA )
- preisschild 10mo agoYeah mine too (but using Silverblue). After spending years with Arch/NixOS/Ubuntu/Sway Im quite happy with Fedora+GNOME now. It just works.
- quantumfissure 10mo agoIt's been well known for awhile now that it's his preferred setup. He seems to want as much stability as possible; while being as minimal as possible; with as little fuss to install and keep up to date as possible. Fedora meets those needs. Gnome is Fedora's main concentration.
- jsk2600 10mo agoHe explained that in the linked video - Fedora makes it easy for him to test custom kernel builds.
- Retr0id 10mo agoOh I didn't know Gnome was the official flavour now, last time I paid attention it was still KDE
- quantumfissure 10mo agoIt's been a long, long time. I think Red Hat 8/9 (from 2002-2003) had a default KDE build. Even in Fedora Core 1 Gnome was default. Now, there's a separate build to download for KDE. It's likely because Gnome is default install for Red Hat Enterprise Workstation.
- loeg 10mo agoI don't think it's ever been KDE.
- apetresc 10mo agoI completely misread '2015' as '2025' and thought these were from this November rather than November 10 years ago. I couldn't believe so many people were still using what appeared to be Aqua-era OS X.
- sho_hn 10mo agoSame for me, until I got to Bram.
- scop 10mo agoMan that hits hard
- gyomu 10mo agoAqua-era OS X is the best looking out of the box desktop environment in the entire history of computing, and given 1) the lack of interest everyone seems to have in the desktop these days and 2) the directions in which the few remaining contenders are headed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it remained that way for a long time. It’d be fun, as a side project, to build a pixel perfect replica of it (along with the core apps that make it useful) that runs on a modern Linux kernel and preserve it in amber forever.
- k4rnaj1k 10mo ago[dead]
- Shorel 10mo agoI've never owned an Apple computer, and I still miss the Aqua-era OS X UI. There was something magical about it.
- ahoka 10mo agoYou might want to check the site again, as the Aqua screenshot is from 2002.
- pelagicAustral 10mo agoOld macOS has got so much soul. I missed all those years since I started working with it back when Sierra was around, clearly not the same.
- tylerflick 10mo agoIf you want a macOS/OS X release with soul, check out Snow Leopard.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- lieuwex 10mo agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722536
- Almondsetat 10mo agoRMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.
- gosub100 10mo agoSee also: Knuth. Literally wrote the book on algorithms, but barely is able to do more than open a window in FVWM.
- clra 10mo agoCan you cite this in some way? Given he's shown the competence to write and typeset an impressive series of books, I find this claim pretty hard to believe.
- gosub100 10mo agohttps://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/.fvwm2rc https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/.fvwm2rc Here is his fvwm rc. Given that it's fully documented, I will walk back my assumption that he can barely open a terminal. I researched it a bit and recalled an interview where he said something like "all I use X windows for is is to open a terminal in FVWM", so he clearly can customize it, but he prefers a minimalist setup.
- svat 10mo agoThis couldn't be further from the truth. He has given several talks where he's projecting his computer, you can see him comfortably switching between all the programs he uses (Emacs, Mathematica, etc); in fact he is very efficient and has them customized just the way he wants it. (I even recall some blog post where the author watched one of these talks and was amazed by just wizardly he was navigating between programs or Emacs buffers or whatever.) If you scroll down to the bottom of https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html you can see his configurations for Emacs and fvwm and even macOS keyboard layouts; some of them were updated as recently as this year. This 2020 profile has a photo of him standing at his desk: https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-telling-stories-20200416/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu... and in the 2008 interview with Binstock (https://mmix.cs.hm.edu/other/knuth-interview.pdf https://mmix.cs.hm.edu/other/knuth-interview.pdf = https://web.archive.org/web/20250408034153/http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856 https://web.archive.org/web/20250408034153/http://www.inform...) he mentioned the set of tools he uses, which includes even “in rare cases, on a Mac with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator”. Overall he is very comfortable with his computer. > I designed my own bitmap font for use with Emacs, because I hate the way the ASCII apostrophe and the left open quote […] I prefer rxvt to xterm for terminal input. Since last December, I’ve been using a file backup system called backupfs, which meets my need beautifully […] Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoHey this one over here [1] has a virtual desktop minimap on the top right. That person mentions fvwm which has this [2] website with screenshots, but I don't see the minimap there. Could someone help me find a reference to it? Update: Also on the bottom left here [3] [1] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_warren_toomey.gif https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_warren_toomey.gif [2] https://www.fvwm.org/ https://www.fvwm.org/ [3] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_jordan_hubbard.jpg https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_jordan_hubbard.jpg
- arexxbifs 10mo agoThe one in the FVWM screenshot is FvwmPager. It comes with FVWM.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoSo I can't just use it by itself. E.g. I use i3wm, would those work together? Sorry if it's a stupid question.
- bilegeek 10mo agoNo. It's FVWM-specific.
- chickensong 10mo agoHaha love that jerkcity is featured in Jordan's screenshot!
- DonHopkins 10mo agoJordan's the rapscallion who scribbled all over Dennis G. Perry's Interleaf windows (program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA) with his infamous global rwall on March 31, 1987. Milo Medin said "Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138 From: Milo S. Medin <medin@orion.arpa> Date: Apr 6, 1987, 5:06 AM Actually, Dennis Perry is the head of DARPA/IPTO, not a pencil pusher in the IG's office. IPTO is the part of DARPA that deals with all CS issues (including funding for ARPANET, BSD, MACH, SDINET, etc...). Calling him part of the IG's office on the TCP/IP list probably didn't win you any favors. Coincidentally I was at a meeting at the Pentagon last Thursday that Dennis was at, along with Mike Corrigan (the man at DoD/OSD responsible for all of DDN), and a couple other such types discussing Internet management issues, when your little incident came up. Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again. There were also reports about the DCA management types really putting on the heat about turning on Mailbridge filtering now and not after the buttergates are deployed. I don't know if Mike St. Johns and company can hold them off much longer. Sigh... Mike Corrigan mentioned that this was the sort of thing that gets networks shut off. You really pissed off the wrong people with this move! Dennis also called up some VP at SUN and demanded this hole be patched in the next release. People generally pay attention to such people. Milo
- chickensong 10mo agoHah, thanks for that bit of fitting lore. HONK!
- shevy-java 10mo agoInteresting how Brian works. I guess it is the UNIX spirit he carries there. Or perhaps he is damn fast with the tabbed WM. Or is that OSX? I use mostly IceWM these days. I can't use the leaner WMs such as ion or ratpoison and XFCE, mate-desktop, KDE and GNOME are too slow or too crap (KDE unfortunately also now; before that only GNOME was crap. KDE killing xorg-support also means it is one less thing I can use anyway.)
- sho_hn 10mo agoOut of curiosity, why's xorg a blocker for you?
- Mistletoe 10mo agoI'd give anything to see their 2025 desktops.
- accrual 10mo agoThis is really fascinating, I would love to see a 2025 version from those willing to respond. All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Little flourish, just windows and text mode apps where needed to finish the day's task. To me, an ideal to aspire to.
- MattDamonSpace 10mo agoWild how well it would fit with CL LLMs in 2025
- tonyedgecombe 10mo ago>All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Well they are hardly going to send in screenshots showing them surfing porn sites or doomscrolling Facebook.
- arendtio 10mo agoTo me, they all look like they just increased their monitor size ;-) Or do you expect IRC users to switch to Discord?
- qustrolabe 10mo agothe last one with XMonad is the only one that looks even remotely good to me in compared to what we have today
- jd3 10mo agoDennis Ritchie running Rob Pike's acme editor on Windows back in July 2002. https://anders.unix.se/images/dmr_screenshot.gif https://anders.unix.se/images/dmr_screenshot.gif https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/ https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer...
- mbrezu 10mo agoNow I would really like to know what these guys think of Omarchy :-D
- Simplita 10mo agoThis brought back memories. It’s wild how much tooling changed in a decade. The contrast really shows how much developer experience has improved.
- chistev 10mo agoIt still looked ugly in 2015. I wonder what 2025 computers would look like because I think they look cool now.
- zkmon 10mo agoShocking to see 2002 is considered as ancient. I still have a vivid memory of those days as if it was yesterday.
- tavavex 10mo agoI was born then. I just graduated from university recently. I'd say it's been a little while.
- layer8 10mo agoTime seems longer when you’re young.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoIt does seem like yesterday. Perception of time changes as one ages. We were settig up the Christmas decorations last weekend and I had an overwhelming feeling of "we just did this like a month ago" but it has already been another year.
- baxtr 10mo agoNow do 2025…
- arun6582 10mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- sunshine-o 10mo agoThe old Mozilla icon on a screenshot (2002) caught my attention. I searched for it and confirmed it was inspired by communist aesthetic https://www-archive.mozilla.org/party/2002/ https://www-archive.mozilla.org/party/2002/
- cxr 10mo agoPreviously: <https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12814590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12814590>
- bullen 10mo agoThis is my desktop 2025: http://ett.host.radiomesh.org/film/HL2%20on%203588%20uConsole.mp4 http://ett.host.radiomesh.org/film/HL2%20on%203588%20uConsol... (controls are impossible at first on 3588 uConsole, this was me playing without the usual bindings just to prove the performance so don't judge the gameplay) 3588 (10W) plays HL2 at 300 FPS and streams it at 60 FPS to twitch. Turns out 2025 was the year of the ARM linux desktop after all! TWM + emacs + irssi + mpv(ytdl)
- mindentropy 10mo agoCan someone identify what font Bram Moolenaar was using in 2015 screen shot?
- chris67 10mo agoLooks like Liberation Mono or Cousine or similar.
- mindentropy 10mo agoIt looks like Liberation Mono. Cousine has a specific "r" and it does not match.
- dijit 10mo agoOne thing I'm reflecting on here is just how boring these screen grabs are. Even if I consider how my PC looked in 2002, the 2015 screenshots are far and away uglier than my desktop experience. Yet... I produce... very little. At least when compared to these absolute titans, who have contributed much more to my computing experience than most - certainly more than myself, I find it somewhat unsettling. This is how my laptop looked in 2015 (it's a screenshot from 2017, but the configs were the same): https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/2017-11-19-003840_4480x1440_scrot.png https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/2017-11-19-003840_4480x1440_scrot.p...
- sph 10mo agoTongue in cheek here, but no wonder you produce little with so many distractions. Two shells full of text, music and IRC open - how is one supposed to concentrate? I still produce little, but I have come to realize only pure, unadulterated silence free from any sort or distraction, however minimal, is worth anything. When I used IRC, not much was accomplished apart from chatting on IRC.
- dijit 10mo agovalid. In general I find it best to close down my IM app of choice these days totally.
- kaluga 10mo ago[dead]