I Use My Terminal

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. 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 than using QWERTY keyboards instead of Dvorak or vim instead of VSCode (or vice versa).

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.

Ten years ago I threw out my massive multi-file, multi-package vim config and have been slowly building up a much simpler vimrc about 1-2 lines a year. I completely agree, defaults in old software are almost always there for a reason and you should try to understand that before changing them.

> (`vim -c cb -` is my favorite feature in Vim; I find it strange that it's so rarely used or talked about).

Care to explain what it does? Trying `ls | vim -` and `ls | vim -c cb -` I don't immediately see a difference.

As someone who uses both vim/tmux and emacs for certain things (and spent years configuring and working only in emacs), my emacs setup is WAY more ad hoc, informally specified, and bug ridden than my vim+tmux setup ;)

vim+tmux setups usually lean on system primitives = pipes, files, signals, scrollback so the tooling tends to stay transparent across environments. that gives them an edge in portability and debugging, especially over ssh or in constrained shells. it's just lets your workflows shaped around different guarantees so natively, it naturally makes building your own vim config an obvious choice

glad you've enjoyed it :) i was trying to find something that was clear while still being easy to skim.

> You mentioned the arcane keyboard shortcuts of tmux.

oh, i've remapped almost all the shortcuts in tmux. `ctrl-k` is not the default prefix and `h` is not the default key for "select pane left".

i haven't tried byobu but from skimming the readme i expect it not to have a ton other than nicer default key bindings, and i'd rather not add more layers to my terminal.

yeah, i got the original regex from tmux-copycat. but a) that regex doesn't handle `:` and b) copycat builds its own "viewer" abstraction on top of saving and restoring the pane state, which means that you can only have one action per search. my thing allows you to use normal tmux configuration syntax to bind actions to the files that are highlighted, because it reuses tmux's built-in search. note how all these plugins are either only supporting copy/paste or building their own "modes" on top, because tmux gives you very little control over highlights unless you use the built-in search.

I am with you when it comes to texts for humans.

However, for speed, I have recently abandoned capitalization and punctuation when interacting with LLMs, unless they are critical for clarity. I wonder if this is why many folks in the AI crowd write everything in lowercase.

It's also interesting to see that the author themselves are clearly fighting against their own instinct to use uppercase: the first 2 items in the "here's what happens in that video:" list use uppercase.

Huh interesting, I didn't even notice that

It's a stylistic choice you sometimes see people commit to. Porter Robinson (a DJ) does the same thing, and it's always struck me as a bit indulgent.

Kids these days. That's how many of us who grew up online in the 90s to early aughts have been doing things for 30+ years.

I think many of us abandoned it when we went professional. Or abandoned it in those contexts but still do it in others. I don't do it on HN, clearly - but I do it almost everywhere else. It's much more natural to me to skip capitals.

I believe there was also a period in the transition to ubiquitous smartphones where it wasn't an option to turn off auto-caps, or maybe there just wasn't the fine-grained control of which auto-correct you use on mobile devices that there is now. I suspect that killed some all-lowercase habits. I think that's why I ended up with a "normal" style on HN where I use caps and normal punctuation (I don't usually use periods for sentences that terminate a paragraph outside of HN.)

Just to be clear, although you can use emacs from a terminal, it’s not the default and not what most people do. So a terminal emulator opened in emacs isn’t really “nested”

This is a HN "feature" removing How if it's the first word in the title. It serves no purpose other than generating confusion, with mods saying this somehow stops clickbait. How, you wonder? Nobody knows.

Thought that this was going to be a 'There Will Be Blood' spoof.

(In case not obvious, current title is 'I use my terminal')

I thought this was going to be a blog post about somebody using a terminal emulator they wrote.

noticed this too after skimming the post, feels like the full title = "I use my terminal (and so should you )"

Plus one for pro-terminal posts. As a chromebooker I've found that all I need is terminal and browser. Switching to my Mac OS seems kinda maximalist and I rarely use much outside of the terminal and, you know, more browsers

HN will automatically trim some common prefixes and suffixes from title submissions

one of the things i want from a terminal is to run things in a dev container by default and have an explicit button for syncing the changes in that container to the host. the difference between this and messing with docker is that it uses the host system as the base layer.

That's the tty or the thing on the other end of the pty (ie your VTE like Xterm) which would have to do that. The shell has no access to any of it.

There is an xterm command for writing the scrollback buffer to a file so in theory if you wanted a hack to enable it today you could use that + grep (or even trigger it with something xdotool if you wanted to automate it.)

yes!! one of the things i really want from a terminal is structured metadata, it allows you to build so much on top. right now anything remotely close requires parsing a bunch of ansi escapes.

Emacs is why I can't go back to terminals.

I make do with just nano and basic pane/window/sockets in tmux. Certainly didn’t put in a few hundred hours learning this. Not even a few hundred minutes.

I hate configuring things. I tried to use PyCharm and it works great until it doesn't, then it's a nightmare. For example, the ruff support is non-existent and the only plugin is broken as hell. I think at some point you just have to accept it won't be perfect, but it is sad because I can "imagine" the perfect IDE. I just don't have the time or energy to make it reality, and apparently neither do Jetbrains