Hacker News Reader

Comment by treve | Hacker News Reader

It always surprises me that people get so much productivity gain out of their editors, shells and keyboards and such.

I write maybe a few dozen lines of code on a good day.

Well. We all do different kinds of work. I'm a scientist, i spend all day looking at and parsing data in a zillion formats. Not to mention writing papers in latex. My productivity directly depends on my ability to ingest and make sense of text files and code and every day is different. A more efficient shell... or more importantly a shell that frees up brain space for other tasks... makes a huge difference.

I often work with colleagues who ask how j get results so fast. They're very surprised when I say "remote emacs and a solid foundation with shell workflows".

When everything you work with is a text file, getting efficient with the shell just makes sense. Ask a carpenter about their tools and organization and you'll get a similar response.

(Fish doesn't make me 3x more productive, but...) I think a good analogy would be having sharp tools. If you don't have to exert yourself to do simple things, then menial tasks use less mental energy which you can save for your actual work.

Fish manages to pull this off without _any_ configuration burden (I use it completely stock), which is exciting because usually to benefit from shortcuts or macros or other "productivity hacks" you have to become a power user.

their take on config is unique:

> Every configuration option in a program is a place where the program is too stupid to figure out for itself what the user really wants, and should be considered a failure of both the program and the programmer who implemented it.

https://fishshell.com/docs/current/design.html#configurabili...

If you're working a lot in the terminal, than fish's convenient auto-suggestion mechanism is really quite a game changer, and it really "feels" 3x more productive because the prediction is pretty good (each directory has its own command history which fish checks first for matches). It's like replacing a traditional search box which only shows exact matches after you hit Enter with a fuzzy-search-box which immediately displays a most likely match while you're typing.

There are plugins for zsh (and maybe other shells) which emulate this feature though.

I am curious what you are doing with the rest of the day? Planning? Meetings?

In my experience, reading code.

Figuring out what lines to write, mostly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com