A terminal-based workflow for research, writing, and programming

Does NeoVim support that out if the box? For regular Vim I'm using https://github.com/christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator.

I am not sure if you tried i3 window manager. It provides similar features but with more freedom.

Yes! I do this and love it. Works locally or via SSH with no difference at all.

> is so buttersmooth and no other setup has given me such an seamless interoperability between an editor and an OS . . . This is the most underrated killer feature.

You've just described what it feels like to be an emacs user. It's all just text[0].

[0] - https://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3996068979/the-levels-of-e...

Have you heard about Org-roam-bibtex ?

https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy9WvF5gWYg Org-roam-bibtex - Quick Presentation

Tried so many times to get into emacs (3 or 4 times) and once into org mode. It unfortunately never made click despite my love for any kind of terminal app and also competition in this space. Just emacs lisp would be the reason to switch from vimscript but again I just couldn't get warm with emacs.

Also I think that the paradigm of modal editing is key to editing, not because I am used it, it just makes sense to have the myriad of functions of an editor easily reachable without too many modifiers. Coding isn't about just writing code but a lot about thinking, editing, staring at code, thinking, editing, jumping, f, /, yy's, dd's, ct, etc. I use modifiers heavily, way more than the typical ctrl/alt, but again to have an extra dedicated mode is crucial, so I can't imagine how any non-modal editor, eg emacs, can excel re UX like vim or nvim do. There must be reason that even the emacs community itself promotes spacemacs, which follows that paradigm, so much. But for some spacemacs is a layer too much adding unnecessary complexity. Besides, vim is also so popular because it's fast, load time, editing, anything.

Whatever, put me into any text field without modal binds and I am pretty much handicapped but maybe I might just missed emacs' hidden qualities. Trying emacs feels going one step back (when coming from modal editing).

Edit: Don't get me wrong, this shouldn't qualify as offense but every time I read some random emacs praise on the net, I never know if I should give emacs another try or if it's just a vocal minority who never experienced proper modal editing and I just should move on.

Org-mode is amazing. If you're on iOS I highly recommend beorg https://beorgapp.com/. In my opinion it's the best app for org on the go (including android).

Yes, I also found "kludge together a bunch of..." a bit misleading since this atomic nature of *nix is why we use it.

There may be a difference in how uniform & integrated the final result is likely to be.

I was referring to the consistency of the user interface and other behaviours. For example, themes and key bindings can be made consistent across emacs modes. They share the same config.

Pros of t-min: - overall greater speed using a computer, you become what people call a "power user". - some sysadmin knowledge. Adopting a terminal based workflow requires to tinker with your system (systemd, sh scripts, building certain repo for a tool you want etc.).

Pros of GUI-max: - You don't have to spend hours learning and configuring things. - Certain tools are just better when they are built out in a GUI for you. I think here in particular of C/C++ debuggers, it's hard to get a nice experience in the terminal.

As for objectively "scoring" it's hard to assign real values. You could eventually measure speed. I have worked in production support solving a lot of benign problems on a day to day basis. This is when I adopted my terminal based workflow. It was way faster than my other teammates using desktop apps.

Looks like a vim plugin: https://gist.github.com/TheCedarPrince/7b9b51af4c146880f17c3...

That is amazing to hear zwayhowder and am happy to hear that made a difference for you! I need to overhaul that article you referenced at some point as I have a different system in place. It still accomplishes the same goals, but is just a bit neater. :) I will have to check out Jurism too.

Best of luck with your research endeavors!

Thanks for the recommendations! Will give them a look.

All are supported. You just need to edit the config file.

Adding keyboard shortcuts is easiest in window manager comparing to full desktop environment where the setting is hide behind the some Setting GUI.

Energy saving feature is basically setting P-state on Intel CPU, and does not work on AMD. You could do it manually by using kernel interface.

I found i3 to be the easiest WM for setting arbitrary keyboard shortcuts. The .config file makes it really convenient, and you can just set the key to run an arbitrary shell command.

i3 is one of those things that supports everything, you just have to configure it. If you want i3 with sane defaults and a pretty style out of the box, you should try i3-regolith[1]

[1]https://regolith-linux.org/

Regolith has at least some of that. I'm using it on Ubuntu. https://regolith-linux.org/

I use dwm, you get keybinding support inside the config file and then you can use scripts or commands to manage everything else.

Dwm isn't for everybody, you modify the c source and compile to get the changes you want. The best part is that the source is small enough to understand for when you want to do something to it.

I installed the i3 version of Manjaro and it came with everything out of the box.

That's odd, I've been using i3 for years now and modals always open as a floating window. Even GIMP (and its many windows) works fine. I don't remember tweaking anything in particular to make it work.

I wrote a Python script to post Markdown files to Confluence but ran into similar problems with retrieving and editing existing documents.

This uses the confluence API and does not simulate the web-ui right ? Our admins disabled API access to confluence sadly.

I use TeXShop. TeXstudio also has this.

Nothing has rivaled VSC for me.

I think [TexPad](https://www.texpad.com/) has this feature. It's my favorite LaTeX editor.

I think maybe we're asking for the same thing. I want to be able to write commands and small scripts smoothly but have nice integration with graphical tools. Oberon, Acme, and Smalltalk all are environments that try this to various degrees...

I would probably agree, but what do you think a better terminal would be like, compared to the traditional ones?

I yearn for a truly modern, speedy and advanced terminal that grows beyond the mold and mindset of a text-only line-by-line Unix terminal.

Terminals of 2020 and beyond need to have first-class support for audio, video, images, and peripheral interactivity/customization. Terminology and iTerm 2's ability to display pictures, and some terminals' support for Sixel is one of the directions I want to see progress in.

- It should be possible to `cat` an image, or a video, or even previews of Word and Photoshop documents. Terminology, iTerm 2 and Sixel-compatible terminals have this to some extent, but it's not standardised and doesn't have a broad support base.

- Programs should be able to raise notifications without relying on third-party/OS-provided utils that have a drastically different API and availability across platforms.

- Rich read-only visualisations of progress should be possible to call up with a few lines of code. I want to see a `dd`, `mv` or `cp` with a graphical progress bar at the bottom of my window. If my OS supports it, I want this to integrate with the UI like the progress widget on my taskbar.

- We should be able to render a piece of output in 3D, if we so desire. I don't want Crysis, but I do want a Matlab logo that I can rotate by dragging my mouse and graphs that zoom when I Ctrl+scroll at them.

- Support for file pickers and rich selection/filtering of file/directory lists. Not for sandboxing, but for convenience.

- A command line builder (like one of the classic Apple OSes had, cannot find a reference now, or something like the one in Fish but more advanced). Only valid combinations of parameters will be supported, mutually exclusive commands are impossible to select. Any arguments that are files will be possible to use with a file picker. Any argument that's a date will get a calendar widget. Any argument that's a boolean or an enum will get a checkbox or drop-down respectively.

- Terminals should be able to intake gigabytes of input per second, up to the limit of the hardware, without choking up.

- We should be seeing 60FPS and beyond as a normal feature.

- We should finally get unlimited scrollback enabled by default. The terminal emulator should keep everything that I've seen before, and remember it for me. We have the space for it, either in RAM or persistent storage. If not, it should be adaptable and drop the scrollback buffer that is lower priority than other applications on the system if they need more resources.

- Unicode should come as standard. Emoji should come as standard.

- End termcap. We should be able to hash out ONE standard to rule them all. We've had 50 years to come up with ideas and opinions. Version it so that we can release a V2 in 2100.

- While we are at it, end Bash and come up with a saner shell notation that doesn't overload single/double quotes, the ampersand, > amd <, or human-text spaces. We have several more decades of syntax design knowledge worked out, and a whole keyboard with >101 keys. We have two Alts, two Ctrls, and a whole function key row. Let's make use of them for non-printable character input and interaction with the terminal.

- (Debatable) consider adding hypertext support. It's here to stay, and not just in the form of HTML.

There's more that can be added, but really, I think terminals deserve better.

So I recently started a job where I'm on Windows, and I've found myself surprisingly enamored of PowerShell. So many of the things that the shell got wrong are done right. The authors wanted to use <, >, etc. as their real meanings, but apparently the early users rebelled at the idea that > was no longer redirect to file. But things that would be nightmares in unix shells, such as going in and adding a new element as the last child of only one of four elements in an XML document (based on its attribute value) are a few lines of code. I still have decades of muscle memory in bash, but I find myself reaching for PS more and more.

The problem is that you really need an interface for loading software components into your system at runtime, which .NET provides, but aside from .NET or COM I am unaware of any other equivalent system. Java's OSGi is the closest, and ugh...

data analytics, stats, machine learning, computational science, computational engineering, the list goes on

plotting/viz using matplotlib, altair, Mike Bostock's D3.js, graphviz, pgf/tikz, inkscape, the list goes on

I can't think of much outside a small subset of pure-math, and a small subset of TCS, where visualization is not part and parcel of daily research activity. (ignoring non-STEM disciplines like english, communication, social/political/economic sciences, etc).

And you would call that "research" terminal-based?

Unfortunately it does not have the image preview aspect that ranger has and the developer is reluctant to include that

Starting with Tmux was quite eye-opening to me for exactly this reason. The power of composable tools is hard to exaggerate.

Did you consider writing in Sublime text?

Mosh supports roaming. Or are you referring to something else about reconnecting?