Comment by javipas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by javipas | Hacker News Reader

I'm always kind of amazed at this kind of desktop setups, and I guess they're not suitable for lots of people for the simple reason that most users have a "consumer" relationship with computers and not a "producer" one.

My biggest question here for people with this kind of text setup would be: don't you surf the web? Do you use then lynx or another text web browser? What about services and platforms that are designed from scratch with images and video as a prominent part of that UI? (Twitter, Facebook, Amazon store for example)?

I guess you simply switch to a visual browser and some visual tool to play video (vlc, mplayer), but I'm curious and I wonder if that text/keyboard mode can be satisfying or convincing for users that are used on the traditional visual UI with windows, icons and the mouse paradigm.

I see the advantages here (OP mentions some of them), but I wonder if the trade offs for the normal user are to big to work in this kind of setup. Who would you recommend this to?

It's not all-or-nothing. Just because you use a tiling window manager and like to operate it with the keyboard doesn't mean you can't use your mouse any more.

I used to use i3, and I used Firefox for browsing.

I used the keyboard to layout the windows where it was more convenient, but I clicked on buttons with a mouse when that was more convenient.

I now use the standard Ubuntu setup, not for any particular reason, just because it's the default. I often miss being able to conveniently layout terminal windows with just a few keystrokes. Trying to keep terminal windows neatly tiled with a non-tiling window manager is so annoying that I don't even bother.

That makes perfect sense, of course. The way the author speaks about that setup could make someone guess that he does everything in text mode. It would help to add information about those other user cases in which the mouse and a visual app comes forward.

> I often miss being able to conveniently layout terminal windows

You should be able to do that using the "Super key" + e.g. left or right

Left and right does nothing, up and down just changes it from maximised to non-maximised.

That’s why I use tmux

This is my approach as well - a single terminal with tmux + vim running covering an entire monitor, and then my other monitor(s) for web browsers.

I tried i3 a year ago, and didn't find much value in it since my terminal is already tiling.

Firefox and a Windows VM are the major reasons for me to reach for my mouse. There's also nm-applet, and obviously gimp and inkscape, but I rarely use those. Oh, and cut'n'paste tends to be easier with the mouse, though xsel can sometimes be useful. Everything else can be controlled from the keyboard. (Like the OP, I use XMonad as well.)

For videos in particular, mplayer can be controlled purely by keyboard. There are GUIs for mplayer (I seem to recall anyway), but I've never used them.

Whether this is the right setup for anyone in particular depends on which apps they use often. Not everything maps nicely to the "everything is text" doctrine. But where it does, the wins are major: text is super easy to handle, index, search, generate. It's easier to record macros to handle text than to do GUI stuff. It's easier to write little tools to process and generate text than to do anything GUIish. Output of these tools again is text, so it composes in the same way that shell pipeline does. Version control works best with text. It's like tarpit of win, the more you dig in the more sense it makes :)

Try nmcli to get rid of your nm-applet dependency. ;)

For nm-applet you can use nmtui as a text-mode substitute, works fine for most tasks.

I mean the idea isn't to never use the mouse, just use it where appropriate and don't do the back and forth of mouse to keyboard which slows you down. (One great aspect of thinkpad's trackpoint is that you never need to move your arm to click something)

I mean it's kinda dumb to reach for the mouse to hit C-c C-p enter then reach for it again to focus your editor.

> most users have a "consumer" relationship with computers and not a "producer" one.

Linus Torvalds avoids Linux distributions like Gentoo or Arch because he believes the whole point of a distribution is to make it easy for the end user to install and use useful apps on top of it.

He also doesn't care about trivialities like bash vs zsh. It doesn't (and shouldn't) matter to 99% of people.

> the whole point of a distribution is to make it easy for the end user to install and use useful apps on top of it

Ubuntu is hard (not impossible, just harder than Arch) to setup the way I want my computer to be.

It's not hard to install useful apps on top of Archlinux (can't speak about Gentoo, never tried it), it's maybe not intuitive at first.

Maybe we can recognize different users have different needs, and what's right for some isn't for others.

> trivialities like bash vs zsh

Yeah, when you spend your life in a shell, the choice shouldn't matter, right ? Just like carpenters shouldn't care about saws...

>Maybe we can recognize different users have different needs, and what's right for some isn't for others.

Exactly, and that's supposed to be the whole reason we have different distributions in the first place, so that they can cater to people who have different preferences.

>Yeah, when you spend your life in a shell, the choice shouldn't matter, right ? Just like carpenters shouldn't care about saws...

To be fair, I think that on just about any distro it should be pretty easy to set a different shell like zsh for your preference. It's not quite the same as wanting to run i3 on Ubuntu.

I can't speak for everyone, but I use a tiling window manager with Firefox on a specific tag ("virtual desktop", but not) which I browse mostly using VimiumFF, an extension that gives me vim keybindings for navigation. Pressing "f" puts a small tag over each link with a set of characters (ff, jj, de, df, etc) and typing the characters in that tag opens the link.

This sounds fantastic and I was about to install it, but I paused when I saw the required permissions:

Access your data for all websites Read and modify bookmarks Get data from the clipboard Input data to the clipboard Access browsing history Display notifications to you Access recently closed tabs Access browser tabs Access browser activity during navigation

... this seems excessive - especially clipboard and historical items.

Those are all necessary permissions since the plugin is basically building a completely new keyboard-driven chrome. It is not simply a skin that remaps a bunch of key bindings.

For example, to open a bookmark from the command line requires read access to your bookmarks in order for the plugin to present you with the list of bookmarks and eventually allow you to search or navigate it somehow. The same applies to opening something from your browsing history or resurrecting a closed tab. Tab switching requires access to the tabs. Clipboard access is for things like copying URLs or the selection in visual mode to the clipboard.

Vimium itself is open source on GitHub and you can see for yourself what it's doing with your data. The Firefox port is by one of the most active project contributors.

In this instance I would imagine that for browsing they would use either Qutebrowser or Surf. I run a very similar setup and use firefox, but that's only because I have about 300 tabs open in normal setup :)

Just because they run urxvt per workspace doesn't mean they can't run another program in a specific workspace, though. It's not a terminal-only setup in the same way that the tty is a terminal-only setup.

I'm with you bro (on the 300 tabs open) ;) Yes, I guess the author also uses visual apps with their GUIs in certain situations

I personally use Chrome or more recently Firefox with Vimium installed. Vimium allows most web surfing to be done without a mouse. https://vimium.github.io

I use w3m which can display images inline (im sure there is a way for lynx to do this as well) I use this for 4chan and HN.

For all other web needs I just hit super+shift+w and it makes a new chromium window in a new workspace.

Writing custom keybinds for launching weirdly specific applications is my favorite part of i3. My least favorite part of i3 is dealing with parts of the UI that I am very used to being graphical, like sound management. I end up installing gnome applets but I would love an alternative to widgets in i3bar.

Well, I have a very similar environment, but I use KDE instead of xmonad and therefore have a much more consumer-oriented desktop at first sight. In addition, I hide my tmux and vim in yakuake, so that I have access to them at any time via a hotkey (F12).

When you look at my monitor you see just a clean, normal desktop with a few Firefox windows (1-3) and maybe a dolphin in the taskbar, not realizing there are a bunch of shell sessions hidden behind a hotkey ;-)

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