Tom Preston-Werner Uses This | Hacker News Reader

Tom Preston-Werner Uses This

tom.preston-werner.usesthis.com

35 pointsicey46 comments

This is not particularly interesting. He uses typical software and hardware. Nothing esoteric, interesting, or insightful here. Just a guy using a Mac getting some work done.

I agree, however I find it refreshing and inspiring. A lot of us use typical software and hardware. Nothing esoteric, interesting, or insightful. Just guys using Macs getting some work done.

it is quite interesting when you look at what this guy is producing.

a single laptop, period. and until recently, not even an office.

That is to teach us, productivity is not necessarily correlated with "gadgetivity"

That's true, but production is not what The Setup is about; it's about the tools you use. So I get what the GP is griping about. If every The Setup becomes a variation of "Hey, I use a MBP, TextMate, and Terminal.app" (like it has been lately), then why read The Setup?

It is interesting but there is very simple lesson to learn: terminal and decent editor is all you need. I know a lot of people who are still afraid of terminal (they can't live without TortoiseWhatever and are not familiar with basic terminal commands) and can't live without fancy development environments (like Visual Studio) after years of development. Even more - terminal + editor allows developer to switch between platforms almost without problem (e.g. my usual week consists of developing completely different projects for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux).

After all David killed Goliath with sling. What's wrong with the fact that magic things happens with dumb tools?

"[A] [T]erminal and decent editor is all you need."

Just to give the other side of the "argument": "all you need" isn't something to strive for. An environment which makes you the most productive is what most people strive for, not the minimum environment to be somewhat productive. IDEs make a lot of people a whole lot faster, and for good reason - smart people have worked really hard to make it that way.

(I mostly use editors and not IDEs these days, but the allure of good IDEs is strong.)

Yup. After writing Java for Android in IDEA 10 CE for a few months I die a little inside every time I want to rename a function in C or JavaScript in TextMate. I should check if anyone has used js2-mode to write some refactoring functions for JavaScript in Emacs.

What good cross-platform IDEs do people use for C and JavaScript?

The only really interesting article on this page so far was the Andrew Huang's one:

http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/

90% of the articles are almost the same - some kind of Macbook, software everyone knows about, "I wish it was lighter and had more battery life" etc. I think it's the format that makes this uninteresting. Probably a lot of those people do in fact use interesting little hacks, configure their software in an unusual way or have a nice looking workspace. But there isn't even a photo of the workspace attached to the article or a bunch of screenshots while people are doing some work. A vidcast or screencast would perhaps be a better medium than an article for doing this, like in the recent "play by play" peepcode screencasts (not an advertisement, they're better, but I didn't found them worth the price so far).

The two that I've found to be most interesting is rms's:

http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/ (think: everything - including his laptop - he uses is open source)

and _why's: http://why.usesthis.com/

I found Russ Cox's interview and setup also pretty original and informative: http://russ.cox.usesthis.com/

Well put. See my similar comment above, written before I read yours. You can only read so many versions of The Setup with the same Mac hardware.

IMO, what The Setup needs to do now is to branch out and ask other types of geeks, not just software engineers. Why not ask astrophysicists, land surveyors, biologists, &c?

  At one focus is suspended a huge, omnidirectional, ten thousand Watt speaker 
  system. At the other focus lies an elaborate, 21 screen wrap-around display 
  connected to a Mac Pro cluster. In this dream, I am seated in a comfortable 
  recline at the computer station while thundering trance emanates from the
  sound system and is parabolically focused upon my exact location.

Ah, so basically the traditional "Grandma's Boy" setup[0]. Yes, I think a lot of us share that dream. The more monitors, the better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHLR3faI7lU&t=00m06s

You know, I've never seen that movie. I suppose the techno-blasting isolation room with tons of monitors is some kind of archetype, to be stumbled upon time and time again by coders throughout the ages.

http://www.stefandidak.com/office/

He loves trance too :)

He should try http://www.iterm2.com/ instead of Terminal.

iTerm2 has some truly amazing features that blow most other terminals out of the water: Full screen hotkey, global hide and show hotkey, better search, better history, and multiple sessions in horizontal and vertical splits is amazing.

Even the little feature like being able to hide the scroll bars for an extra few columns, or having growl notification of output when the app is in the background have made a huge difference in my productivity.

How do you find it speed wise? Last time I used it, it was struggling with full screen ncurses apps, but that was probably two years ago now.

If you haven't seen it in 2 years you'd be very surprised. Another developer took over it's development and has done a great job whacking it into shape. I use it instead of Terminal.app now and don't find it lacking.

Agree, I use iTerm too. I wish it could do proportional fonts.

A more interesting article by Tom Preston-Werner: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-3...

That was a great post. Also love this clip of him on "The Road from Ruby Hacker to Entrepreneur" - http://confreaks.net/videos/432-rubyconf2010-the-road-from-r...

His dream setup reminds me of Grandma's boy & Swordfish.

  I use TextMate for writing code, and it does most of what I need, 
  but the allure of emacs is strong and I think that one day I will
  take the time to learn it and harness its power, but for now, I’m
  a TextMate man, and it treats me pretty well.

Oh how I love my father for teaching me the dark arts of emacs when I was 12.

I've actually started using Vim since I wrote this post, and it's treating me nicely. I still use TextMate for a lot of things, but as I become more familiar with Vim, I find myself there more and more. It feels much more natural to me than Emacs.

I'm sure a lot of people here would love a follow-up post about your Vim setup.

Check out some of Gary Bernhardt's videos (also a play by play on Peepcode).

I stole a whole lot of things from his VIM setup (red/green bar for test runs in VIM just rocks).

Dark arts indeed. Emacs is an usability atrocity.

Usability does not mean able to understand and completely master at the first sight.

Complex problems require powerful solutions - something you actually have to work a little to learn to use.

First of all, why would you assume that by "usability" I mean "being able to understand and completely master at the first sight"?; Let me tell you why, because __some__ users of Emacs think that by learning to use some bloated piece of junk software will make them special, that by learning to use Emacs they somehow demonstrate their intellectual superiority among their mates. So you're inferring that people who don't like Emacs or prefer other editors are somehow intellectually inferior to those who learn it and use it. Well, that is not the case. In fact, if you can achieve exactly the same thing with a simpler, easier to use tool and you're still using the bloated one, it's you who is mentally retarded, not those who use the other tool. So just to conclude, just spare me and others of this bullshit. And also please note that I know what usability is, and when I wrote my previous comment I was thinking about very precise Emacs issues which I don't have time and I also don't want to discuss. But that's just the way I feel about Emacs. You might very well use and love it but please don't try to sell me your bullshit.

TextMate takes some good ideas in Emacs and improves them (from the user's perspective), like pressing Option to start a rectangular selection so you can see the selection as you make it.

Emacs is far more consistent in that basically everything is a command invoked either by keyboard shortcut or M-x, but in this case I think it hurts usability. It seems modes of any kind are not Emacs' thing, even tiny ones like rectangle selection. It could be though and that is a great strength. If someone wants it enough they can write it.

Oh how I love Steve Yegge for convincing me that time that I was putting into it before was well-worth it.

whats with all the guys going laptop only these days ? thats an ergonomic nightmare and i am so much more productive with 2 screens.

Two screens anchors you in one place. Some of us value the flexibility of being able to go work out of a coffee shop whenever we damn well please.

To add to that, I personally get no benefit from extra screens; maybe it takes a certain type of brain, but I'm able to visualize everything in my head very easily to the point where I can not be looking at a screen of text but still recall it all just fine. Having windows crammed onto a screen just isn't an issue for some of us. :)

Never really understood the "to be able to work from coffeeshops" argument. Actually we have an office, i have to commute to everyday but i love it far more than working on my own. I am achored to the office yeah, but its the place where i can get most done and talk to other engineers working on the same project. Its not that having a Desktop disqualifies you from having a laptop aswell, so if i feel like it, i could still work from somewhere else. I like to have the best gear for every situation, so in the office having a workstation with 2x 24" screens and a MBA for on the road seems to be perfect for me. Dropbox makes syncing relativly painless.

Oh yeah the brain argument ;) Well people tend to work on different stuff. I am a game developer and apart from a huge IDE i also need to compile builds, test server & client on the same machine, view debugging/docs while running the builds etc. With only the Laptop screen its a major pita. For doing some web development its mostly fine though i guess.

The link between screen resolution and productivity is well established:

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2008/03/screen-s...

I have two screens sitting on my desk at home with bluetooth keyboard. Plug it in when I am at home with bluetooth keyboard, and laptop when I am away (although I usually always take my external mouse with me)

Perhaps that works for some people, but others (like myself) still differ. To each their own. :)

I can see what you mean. I do ok on the laptop alone, since you only need 80 columns of width. You end up just paging up and down a bit more

And Spaces and/or virtualterminals are a dream

There's nothing stopping your from plugging a huge monitor and keyboard into a laptop. I find this tradeoff to be hugely more valuable than trying to sync my projects between two different machines. Dropbox is good, but when you are running multiple languages and frameworks locally, there isn't much that can keep your config and databases in sync.

Yeah but Laptop screens are not ment to be looked at from that far away, also a big difference in screen size (while having a similar resolution) isnt very appealing for the eyes.

Syncing is harder when Databases etc are involved yes, but we have a dev server in the office for that anyway where people ssh into so you dont really work locally. I work locally on game development where dropbox syncs whole projects just fine.

Still, my only computer currently is a 15" MBP Early 2011 QuadCore, High-Res Matte Screen, 8GB RAM and SSD. And you know what? I regret buying it because for my usecase the fans start getting noisy way too early.

It turns out you can hook up an external keyboard, mouse, and screen to a laptop, and then put the laptop on a stand so the screen is raised the same level as the external screen.

I'm considering getting a MacBook pro or MacBook Air.

Can you hook them up to 2 external monitors? Or are you limited to one external monitor plus the laptop's screen?

Only one. You can use USB2DVI or some other awkward solution but its not going to be like 2 native monitors. 2 external Monitors will also probably heat the machine up quite a bit.

I envy that macbook pro configuration :) Do you guys know of any MailPlane alternatives to manage multiple gmail accounts?

I'm a pretty huge fan of Postbox. It eats RAM, but once you get to 8GB that's less of an issue.

Sparrow

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