Comfy Software: A software aesthetic for hackers with depression | Hacker News Reader

Comfy Software: A software aesthetic for hackers with depression

catgirl.ai

193 pointsvmoore143 comments

It makes me cringe when I see the term "depression" being used lightly, and in this instance in my opinion used for marketing.

It uses the depression the title and it does not many any further mention of it or justifies it.

Tuberculosis used to be considered a fashionable illness.

From a brief review of Peter Kramer's Against Depression (2005):

Consumption (tuberculosis) was viewed as a somewhat fashionable disease, a sign of an artistic and intellectual nature. (It was probably viewed that way by artists who contracted it; the greater "unwashed masses" who also were afflicted with the disease had no such pretensions.) Of course, tuberculosis eventually succumbed to medicine and fell out of fashion. (It is still a problem in communities underserved with health care.) To a certain extent, depression has some of that cachet attributed to consumption by earlier generations, but Dr. Kramer thinks that depression will eventually go the way of tuberculosis and be cured with medicine.

I've suffered from severe, treatment-resistant, unipolar depression for over 25 years. I respect those who are able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and don't let depression define their lives, but there are a lot of us who are not that strong, for whatever reason, and for whom depression majorly colors our lives.

idk- in a way, it kind of makes sense to me... When you're depressed, especially if it's a chronic condition, having "comfy" things around you definitely helps.

(I totally get your argument too, though)

I get where you are coming from but this seems like gatekeeping to me? Who here determines whether or not the author is depressed? Do they need to delve into their past traumas to satisfy the critics?

They don't need to do anything, but using depression as a marketing gimmick is bad taste and will be judged poorly.

If that is gatekeeping, well ok.

I don't see it as a marketing gimmick. I see it as "I'm depressed and this helped me so this might help other people who are depressed.

By this metric, any good software or development practice is an antidepressant. And...they aren't not in a sense, but it's just such a strange and, I guess, selfish? self-centered? solipsistic? way to frame and label the idea of doing things correctly and comfortably in a professional setting. Like, the common factor of good or bad software characteristics isn't that they're going to send every user into a depression or bring them out of one. A bad feature might annoy users, and if it annoys them enough it might contribute to depression, but putting the entire burden of depression on a single software tool is like a carpenter claiming that a single bad hammer gave them depression.

What, exactly, are they bringing to market?

I see people more and more putting their not so neurotypical issues front and center, especially among the young. I see this among my own children and their friends. Saying with a light tone "and then I had a full blown panic attack" or "I didn't want to go because I was depressed." I suspect this is just part of a greater acceptance of mental health issues in society in general, but I'm not sure they realize the weight these terms can have for some people, or that they can come off as making light of something that is quite serious for many people.

Many of the people using these are clinically diagnosed with depression, anxiety, etc.

They may be making light of it, but it's not unserious for them - they're just open about their struggles.

Agreed. I also believe that many of them are attempting complex diagnoses with zero training.

Perhaps. Most of these diagnoses are done by a doctor or a therapist asking you to fill out a questionnaire (written or verbal) and then just summing up the points. You can do this online yourself.

That's only slightly less training that psychiatrists and their ilk.

I would still be very curious how this openess becomes a negative feedback cycle.

I have big sleeping issues, have/had depression and a neurological issue with my nerves.

But while I'm very aware of those issues, I'm not reflecting on them in public nur do I center my daily life around them.

I do talk about it sometimes but only in short amounts. Enough that people might tell me they have the same issue (family -> genetics) or they have a better understanding why I might just have concentration issues at the moment.

The author made it very obvious if not front and center that she/it doesn't feel part of a biological gender role and redefined that.

I'm wondering why my life still doesn't rotate around things I can't really change while for others it's a fundamental part of their life/how they express themselves.

There is also a blog from someone similar where that person draws quite bad images of some character. The question would also be why others evaluate their own doing in a way that they wouldn't present medicare drawing skills on the internet vs. expressing yourself anyhow.

What if the self reflection is broken?

What if not giving any feedback to stuff like this holds their own development?

I have to say I find it easier to focus on the technical things but I do get triggered by those things as well.

It's hard to determine if that person is okay or not.

There was also someone at a save space who got crazy aggressive and said that if person x is doing y again they will hit her in the face.

Is that really the definition of save space were you give a person which such crazy aggression issues space or would you expect that person to get professional help?

Being open to whom? To the internet? Why?

And now shouldn't the internet also be a save space for everyone else?

I think it's another area where we have fallen into using overly strong descriptive words, a la the comedy bit about the deployment of the word "awesome" to mean "good" or "ok" or "fine" versus "inspiring awe."

If you have a moment of panic when you are late and can't find your keys, it becomes a "panic attack" when the story is related.

Just another channel to oversaturate.

Yeah, there also a verbal oneupmanship going on it seems. Or just an absurd exaggeration for attention. People even use the word rape in the context of experiencing a minor setback. And on top of that you have this recent fad of adding "literally" in front of this kind of thing. So "damn, I lost" is now "damnit bro, I literally got raped right there!"

Valid point. I have never worded that myself as a father of two children, but I think you are spot on mate.

> ... I suspect this is just part of a greater acceptance of mental health issues in society in general, ...

This is how I see it too.

Baby Boomers and Gen X had quite a different view of psychological issues and it had a detrimental effect on population at large. Now that a lot of the taboos surrounding it are broken, later generations are emphasising them by exaggeration.

I don't see it as an issue at all. I see it as the pendulum swinging back with more force than it was pushed.

oh snap Gen-X, it's no longer just the boomers getting blamed for all of societies ills!

Show me on the doll where the mean generation touched you.

gestures towards the part of the millennial doll that killed the mcwrap

Where is "marketing" coming from here?

If you read more of her stuff, I think it's clear that it's presented as sort of a personal space. When written for an audience that isn't The General Hacker News Audience, things like that... work differently. It might be her and like two friends in a group chat that were bouncing this around and maybe talked about how it's relevant and she wrote this up to sketch out the idea more.

When the opening says "there's still software out here that makes me feel happy to use" and the concluding paragraph says "Obviously, not all software needs to fit into this" I just don't think you can judge this by the standards of A Manifesto Seeking New Adherents.

There is the voice of someone who has never actually been in the position of getting into an actual pit of depression over the toolchain you have to use. No joke but I was doing some work on VSTO in Visual Studio Classic a few years back and it really did me in. Every day was this unpredictable nightmare that was going to attack me over and over again. I dreaded getting up in the morning in the end and developed a reputation for being late and unreliable, which are two things that aren't my usual self. It took me a few weeks to realise it was early stages of depression.

Since then I spend a lot of time carefully evaluating tools and software before I ever consider using it or taking on work that involves it. This is to avoid the mental toil that is almost endemic in really horrible bits of software.

Quite frankly this article nails it. Software has to be comfy or it can fuck off before it hurts me.

The author likely has it though. On his about page [1], he says " ..i hate my body, and to a somewhat lesser extent hate my brain (and even my mind)." Clearly tech is an outlet for finding comfort for the author

[1] https://catgirl.ai/pages/robot/

I'm pretty sure that the author of "catgirl.ai" is not a "he." From that same page:

> i would very strongly object to being called a man anywhere

> i like 'it' pronouns for myself, [...] and 'she' is still acceptable, i'm still close enough to a girl for that to be okay.

The page quite obviously describes someone who is severely mentally damaged.

I didn't read the entire page, but the title of the blog is "Gay Robot Noises"

I have depression, I think it is an apt title.

Whether the software I'm using is cooperating with me can be the difference between me getting something done or giving up completely.

And it is largely about traits described in this article.

As a reasonably able amateur, anything involving Linux is pretty much the opposite of comfortable.

I have a recurring pattern: I undertake some sort of project involving installing Linux somewhere, run into problems, spend huge amounts of time googling stuff and trying random solutions from forums and Stackoverflow, before strengthening my confirmation bias that "Linux isn't ready for the desktop", then giving up and promising myself never to be so daft again. Sadly, time always dims the pain, and it only takes a few months before the cycle repeats.

It's depressingly reliable, whatever the project; e.g.:

* using a Raspberry Pi as a wireless access point (failed, despite multiple attempts and approaches)

* using a Raspberry Pi as a more clever USB drive for a Tesla's dashcam footage (never reliable, despite closely following instructions

* installing NVidia & CUDA drivers in Ubuntu (nah)

* installing NVidia & CUDA drivers in Fedora 35 (mostly nah)

* installing NVidia & CUDA drivers in Fedora 36 (almost worked... despite 36 not being officially supported!)

(To be fair, setting up a PiHole was pretty painless - props to them!)

Surprised to see cuda called out here, that one has been relatively painless over the years for me on Ubuntu.

Relative to OpenCL, you mean?

> anything involving Linux is pretty much the opposite of comfortable.

This is extremely subjective, both the the individual due to their expertise and the task at hand... e.g doing much software development on windows will drive many developers insane.

> This is extremely subjective As you would expect, in a discussion about things being comfortable.

I feel the same way about Linux these days and I’m not an amateur. Hardware support wise it’s the best it has even been, but it feels increasingly unstable software wise. The fragmentation is crazy, things are hard to rely on long term, and there’s no consistency.

I’d had enough and started using OpenBSD for everything and am much happier personally. It at least feels more stable and I can trust it not to break. If it does break the documentation is second to none and always accurate.

(These are just my personal feelings, nothing more)

Anything to do with nvidia is a pain and that's nvidias fault.

Why I use ChimeraOS now. It's now a PC gaming appliance.

Anything can be painful. It would be painful for a person without legs to climb Mount Everest. There are some people that just get Linux and run Arch and file detailed bug reports and others that just use beginner level distros and complain when something doesn't work.

For the Pi as an access point, it's easier to just install OpenWRT on it. As a USB drive, you're likely to have issues with the SD card in a vehicle. Probably better to run on something that has eMMC storage and a dedicated SATA port instead of relying on USB.

For installing Nvidia and CUDA drivers, i use Chimera OS for gaming. It's now an appliance that can be accessed from the TV for game streaming, or we can sit directly in front of my color correct display with keyboard and mouse. All updates are atomic so there's no cruft that requires a reinstall every few years.

My professional codebase actually really upsets me - sometimes I dread going on holidays purely because I know when I return to it, it’ll take me a week to get over the feeling of just wanting to quit. It’s really nice to see this post put out in words what makes me happy when I program.

Wouldn’t the solution be to seek more of the rewarding parts of programming and re-evaluating exactly how destructive to your mental health working in that “professional” environment really is?

I agree with you, but it's easier said than done. Especially if you're already depressed, drudging forward can seem like the path of least resistance, even though it often isn't.

No doubt. Depression is debilitating in so many subtle as well as visible ways. As parent is currently the most-upvoted comment, I believe it important to ask the obvious questions to maybe start a conversation.

People have bills to pay, and programming is one of the more acceptable ways to do it.

That’s a superficial argument. Is permanently exposing yourself to a level of emotional stress that results in a semi-permanent depressive state really worth the money?

I’d argue that if you have the skills to code, you are well suited for other areas as well, depending on your willingness to adapt. If you’re already depressed it’s harder to see alternatives and easier to feel trapped though.

> I’d argue that if you have the skills to code, you are well suited for other areas as well, depending on your willingness to adapt.

Could you please state what those are?

struggling with this question as well.

obiously it is highly dependent on the individual, but in the end, it depends on the boss making/getting the connection and not be like "nah, but i relly could need an IT guy"

If you code at a professional level, you are likely of above average intelligence. You are able to efficiently reason about complex systems to some degree. Those two skills alone qualify you for many jobs, especially when you’re willing to learn. What those are depends entirely on your interests and further skills.

Often, looking into a completely different direction is helpful. Ask yourself what you enjoy doing, apart from programming and computers. It could be cooking, gardening, talking to people, writing, teaching, whatever. Something that is not stressful for you to do. Something your friends maybe told you at one time or the other you’re good at without having to put great effort in it. Something that doesn’t drain you if you’re doing it for extended periods of time. Often that’s where you can find what’s truly important to you and your inherent skills are. Go from there. Let yourself be inspired. Those could be technical or entirely apart from what you’re currently doing.

When you start looking into unconventional jobs, you’ll be astonished what kind of work exists within reach. It often just looks like it isn’t because you’d have to leave your comfort zone to pursue them. That’s the issue with comfort zones: even if you feel like shit, it’s a familiar feeling. As humans, we tend to go with what we know, even if it leads to constantly feeling terrible. This way, we can at least make sense of what surrounds us. Going into the unknown is scary, sometimes it feels like mortal danger.

If you can afford it, take a sabbatical to clear your head. If you have a partner, talk to them about what you’re going through.

I appreciate that you're exhorting people to take some initiative to find alternatives to misery. Your contribution is a positive one. So I support that, good job. I apologize in advance for the lack of positivity in the rest of my reply.

But, for me at least, the problem is that the evidence seems to indicate that, in my life at least, you're super wrong. Sure, okay, I'm of above-average intelligence, and able to efficiently reason about complex systems to some degree. It turns out that, although necessary for a great many jobs, they do not alone qualify me for those jobs. I think I'm willing to learn, but sometimes it seems that I'm not particularly able. I did software for most of a decade, including getting a visa to work in Silicon Valley, and it beat me up pretty bad. I like teaching, by which I mean one-on-one conversations or giving lectures, so I have mostly been pursuing that as a career for most of a decade. And it turns out that the job of teaching involves a lot of things other than the act of teaching, and those other things are way worse than software ever was. So now I'm just as miserable, for half as much money. Though at least I DO get to spend about 6 hours of paid time a week doing teaching-the-act, and that's nice. And because I'm so hilariously poorly-paid, I have job security, because every time they look for new hires, almost everyone who applies is obviously incapable, because you have to be a fool to take this job, so that's nice too.

I do think it's worth it for people who feel miserable to try to figure out how to be not-miserable. But as a related comment says, I enjoy food and shelter. At this point I'm torn between the known misery-and-low-pay-but-job-security of teaching, vs throwing myself back into the meat grinder of software development, knowing I'll make twice the money for less hours worked, but probably I'll get abused and fired again.

Is that a superficial argument?

I get where you’re coming from and empathize. I’ve been in that place for most of my life.

I believe the “food and shelter” argument to be a straw man though. My point is not about throwing yourself into destitution or even a situation in which the financial stress probably just replaces the job stress. That gains you nothing but more misery. There is plenty of middle ground between a good tech salary and starving homelessness.

However, if you permanently value living in a house of your own, driving an upper-class car, owning lots of tech gadgets and whatever else the millions of things are many people feel they need to be happy, over your mental health, this is not going to make much sense. Effectively, you don’t just sell your body for work, you sell your soul. This can even have disastrous results in retirement. I have met very well-off retirees who wouldn’t stop complaining about the “idiots” they had to work for and with.

It’s surely nice to be able to afford shiny things. It's certainly better to cry in the back of a taxi than having to take the bus in that condition. But if you’re willing to cut back and shrink your whole footprint, it is absolutely possible to find a different lifestyle and real contentment. I advocate for the Dieter Rams guideline of “less but better”. In fact, we need less of everything to keep living, with the sole exception of love – for ourselves and others. Everything else flows from that.

If you treat yourself well, others will too. And treating yourself well has very little to do with the amount of money you make or what you can afford. Treating yourself well flows from deep within. More money makes this easier and harder at the same time. The more stuff, the more distractions.

For me, it has become quite impossible to work on useless products and results. Most of what gets built, especially in software, is needless busywork. Just imagine if this energy could be channeled into solving real, hard issues facing us all. For now, that's a rather absurd pipe dream. Living in the real world, we have to adapt to what it is today — and ideally work towards a different tomorrow. So I for one am moving towards new horizons now, earning less than a quarter of what I made before. For me, that’s fine, because I cannot be different. That being said, I totally understand that many feel there's no alternative to the status quo.

>Is permanently exposing yourself to a level of emotional stress that results in a semi-permanent depressive state really worth the money?

Yes.

Why?

I enjoy food and shelter.

I feel like Bender from Futurama. He was made with one job in mind:

Bending.

Its exceptionlly well paying considering I have no formal qualifications or the patience to get any. These two facts are enough for me to not even entertain the idea of leaving IT in general.

The emotional stress of not having food and shelter is worse?

These bootstraps don't provide the leverage you think they do. Changing careers is hard and most of them come with their own flavour of bullshit. Some people have dependents and can't afford to turn the whole ship halfway through their journey.

Hey, if you’re committed to find specific examples where general ones don’t work, you’re certainly going to find an endless supply of them. I cannot, will not and never have claimed to be able to provide concrete help for individual situations. In the end you’re entirely free to choose your own way, whatever that may be. I guess it’s just that knowingly choosing permanent depression in exchange for perceived financial stability is an unfathomable proposition for me.

This is me every time I have to work with react, and that's with toy projects in my web development course. Can't imagine how hellish it is to work with a mature, half a decade old big React code base.

From what I've seen, you might not need to worry much about that. React codebases seem get rewritten every 3-4 years.

react codebases at size are more or less department wide passive aggressive blog posts (see slack or any comment section on a changeset) masquerading as jira tickets and agile meetings

> My professional codebase actually really upsets me - sometimes I dread going on holidays purely because I know when I return to it, it’ll take me a week to get over the feeling of just wanting to quit.

This is pretty much the exact set of circumstances that I find myself in, to the point of wanting to write a webapp in a weekend or two, that'd let me keep a log of when and why I wanted to submit my resignation, with descriptions/images and so on.

It is also kind of why I have a slightly ranty section on my blog, that attempts to document the interesting ways how the variety of software that I've used can fail (either in the literal sense, or just with how it hinders my attempts to get things done), called "Everything is Broken": https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken

I just realize that there are so many "broken" things out there, that I literally don't have enough time to write everything down - e.g. describing how hard exporting data from an Oracle instance and then re-creating a similar setup inside of a local Oracle XE container was, with everything that broke along the way (text encoding, export formats, SQLPlus refusing to read files with empty lines, SQLPlus having a problem with the SQL Developer export format, there not being easy to use CLI exporters for Oracle data, there being problems with the init scripts of the Oracle XE 18 images, there being problems with certain DDL being exported but refusing to be imported, certain features that are not available in XE, tablespaces not being automatically extended by default) all just so I could test applications locally with decent performance.

Of course, there are also certain behaviors or mindsets that result in the experience with certain codebases becoming miserable; I'd also like to write more about how to develop software for a more positive outcome, so props to the author for expressing her thoughts along those lines!

I had this is a huge way with my previous employer. Everything about the code base was terrible, every choice that could be made along the way was the wrong one. Even the (CVS) tagging strategy for releases was just horrible. I really dreaded getting up in the morning because I knew the entire day was going to be a slog through the mud of bad design and worse code.

I'm way happier now, working for a company that has thoughtful people doing the bulk of the design work.

We all have different definitions of cosy software, but mine would be software that feels right, and slightly magical.

I remember trying out Python and getting butterflies in my stomach. MacOS gave me the same feeling back in 2012.

The most recent one for me is Procreate. It manages to both work as a simple sketch book replacement, and a Photoshop equivalent. It's a treat to use.

So interesting, I have an extremely averse reaction whenever I used (and still have to use) the three software you mentioned. They are as far as possible as what is comfy for me.

What is comfy for you?

my basic i3 desktop - I remember when I tried i3 for the first time, I had put the intro video and just followed the keybindings and it instantly felt the most natural I had ever felt with my computer (having been through dos, win 9x up to 7, with aston shell, various stardock stuff I forgot the name of, litestep, bblean, xoblite, linux with kde 3, fluxbox for a very long time, gnome 2, kde 4, gnome 3, and a few others)

https://zim-wiki.org/ - I'm still trying to find a way to make it interoperate well with my remarkable if anyone has any idea. bonus points if it can somehow work with freeplane for mind mapping...

most kde software - dolphin, okular, gwenview are exactly what I want

krita

bitwig studio

davinci resolve

qt creator

i'm trying to the software I mainly develop, https://ossia.io reach my ideals in terms of comfiness but i'm not there yet haha

Nice! Thanks for these, excited to read more about Zim Wiki and Ossia.

> that feels right, and slightly magical

Postgres does this effect to me. It’s the perfect SQL syntax, the regular one, etc.

I find cute names rapidly exhausting. I loved it at first, but it turns into a meaningless zoo quite often.

Agreed

Doing a cute name can work for a project that are public but when it is private and you don't have a good way to search for projects or even understanding why you would need the project it really confuses people.

Naming versions is worse for Ubuntu because I can't remember what the two letter phrase is. But, a single word I can somewhat remember (macOS uses a single word).

Except for Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, El Capitan, High Sierra, and Big Sur.

They do have the benefit of at least referencing a single entity, unlike Ubuntu's naming convention.

Ubuntu repositories are referenced by single word though (trusty, xenial, bionic, focal, impish, jammy, kinetic), you can pretty much ignore the second one and you're still being... precise (12.04).

I think I still prefer them? Projects with descriptive names, given time, will evolve and scope creep until the name becomes more misleading than descriptive.

With cute names, at least everyone knows they have to ask.

I agree and disagree! :-)

I agree that you probably shouldn't have cute names for internal important things ("batman" as an internal server/project name is cute, but doesn't convey much unless you have a "bat" or "cave" or similar product/service/process).

That said, at work, we have "Saint Even". This is a cute name for a common problem in our field -- Eventual (Even) consistency. When Saint Even (Pronounced like "Evan") comes to visit, we know we're going to have to either throw up our hands and accept it, or delve into how to fix it. One time, Saint Even blessed us with a 10 second delay. We decided to accept that one because the effort to fix was too large for the delay... However, we should be able to handle a visit from Saint Even for at least 1-2 seconds... It's also easier to say "Saint Even" (when first bringing up the topic, to be clear it's not a person named Evan), and then later "Even" during the discussion, then "Eventual Consistency"...

We also get to laugh at the joy this Saint Even fellow brings us as we often need to collaborate to understand where the error happened / did it overwrite data or just stop a process / how can we better handle it in the future (ideally without forcing master-node reads.. e.g. a better detection/retry)

>When Saint Even (Pronounced like "Evan")

So, if that's how it's pronounced, what does it sound like when a (presumably English speaker) says it?

Steven?

I remember one of the projects I was part of, in a big company.

It was called Voyager, and was about porting the company's software, that was currently running on SunOS/SPARC, to Linux/x86. (As SPARC was about to be EOL'd.)

Like Voyager, the space probe, it was about moving away from the Sun (OS) :-)

I would add another item: stable design. Don't put out an update every two weeks that randomly removes or changes features.

> Non-corporate / Not-for-profit governance

People constantly forget how important this is.

Tons of corporate-driven software uses:

- competitive [in]compatibility https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/competitive-compatibil...

- unnecessary complexity

- corporate-centric licensing

- high feature churn rate

- CLAs

- open core

This is absolutely a thing.

I also have a side project like that, a library that I can come back to after working 9 hours a day on some trash garbage codebase that unironically makes me want to commit die. It helps to know that there's a program or several, no matter how small, that are actually well thought out and carefully implemented.

I don't get the resistance to for profit software. My favorite editor is Rider. It's for profit, I pay for it and it's light years ahead of other options.

People worked hard to produce that product they should be free to profit from their labor.

That's fine, but is it cozy?

It absolutely is. In my opinion.

It explains it in the post. What did you not get?

> In order for software to be comfy, the people who have the final say over what does and doesn't go into it shouldn't be beholden to a for-profit entity.

> But that entity itself should be actually a community focus, and not just a thin facade around one or two megacorporations that just dictate what happens

However good your for-profit software is, it can't be those things, so it's not "cozy."

> I think of this as the 'no VS Code' clause: no matter how good VS Code is, I refuse to use it because it's fundamentally a Microsoft product and I want my text editor to actually be FOSS, dammit.

Yes, the post says those things, but those things have absolutely zero to do with whether or not a piece of software feels good to use. I have lots of paid software that's lightyears ahead of whatever is available for free. If that doesn't fit the definition of cozy, oh well. I'll stick with the software that makes my life better for a few dollars a year.

For non-programmers, non-profit open source software is at least as opaque and inaccessible as for-profit software. At least with for-profit there is some monetary incentive to support and build the software, even when doing so is dull and tedious or when the users have uninteresting or troublesome asks.

For many people there's nothing cozy about non-profit software; rather, it teeters on an abyss of frustration and suffering wrought of poor support and indifferent developer goals.

And before it's stated, paying a contractor to modify open source software is just another for-profit model.

> so it’s not “cozy”

It doesn’t fit this one person’s proposed definition of cozy software. Not quite the same thing.

I don't understand why people dislike GNU Info doc. I often do not think about checking them, because `man` is so ingrained in my brain, but when I do I often find them quite good. For example the info page for tar is much more complete than its man page.

Probably a UI issue. 'info' is very weird unless your an emacs user. 'man' is just open and scroll up and down.

second that

man page or web search

Does anyone know of alternative UIs for viewing info pages? Using less(1) would be nice, but is it straightforward to do so?

https://github.com/baszoetekouw/pinfo

mature project packaged for Debian and other distros, nice colorful curses-based UI, fast muscle-memory conducive keyboard control, you're welcome

Sure, that's how I do it.

  $ info git | less

Wait, does git actually have documentation in info format?

  $ info git | head
  info: No menu item 'git' in node '(dir)Top'
  GIT(1)                         Git Manual                         GIT(1)

  NAME
       git - the stupid content tracker

  SYNOPSIS
       git [--version] [--help] [-C <path>] [-c <name>=<value>]
           [--exec-path[=<path>]] [--html-path] [--man-path] [--info-path]
           [-p|--paginate|-P|--no-pager] [--no-replace-objects] [--bare]
           [--git-dir=<path>] [--work-tree=<path>] [--namespace=<name>]

That's just info(1) falling back to the man page.

Thanks, I did not realize that it does that.

`man' is awful when there is more than a few "pages" to scroll through and you can't easily skip stuff because it is an all or nothing endless scroll of text.

It is great for references, but not for reading in a non-linear way. They are called "manpages" after all, not "mantomes" :-P.

Texinfo and similar are much better for this and the info format is fine as a text-based format (or with some minimal image use but not all viewers support those).

The problem is that the default `info' viewer feels weird to most people, but there are alternatives like `pinfo' (which IIRC uses lynx-like keys) and `tkinfo' (a GUI-based viewer written in Tcl and Tk). IIRC KDE's help viewer can also view info documents.

Texinfo and info is also nice with its index functionality and how it supports multiple indices. In a way info is kinda like CHM (but with optionally multiple indices) and Texinfo is the official way to make info documents.

I find it's unfair to single out VS Code without mentioning VSCodium, the open source distribution of VS Code.

Depending on what you do, there is stuff that only works in the original VS Code, and not in VSCodium. And the extension stores are different between the two. It's a pity, I'd much prefer VSCodium.

you can do everything in vs codium you can in vs code, it’s just more manual

Vscodium is a wolf in a sheep’s skin and part of the fracturing strategy VSCode spearheads. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

> It's because Visual Studio Code is a ramp to move the developer tooling ecosystem towards an end-to-end consumable services model of software development tools

> Microsoft can step in at any moment to create legal crises that strategically divide the market from a business perspective because like Apple and their AppStore: it is their ecosystem that they control and they are in absolute control

> Microsoft can easily fork open-source communities by changing towards proprietary defaults ("strategically divide the market") as Microsoft has already done twice so far. The way Microsoft forks open-source communities is by releasing Visual Studio Code extension updates that make their proprietary offering the default once they have managed to capture enough adoption...

Gentoo, i3, polybar, alacritty, nvim, wallpaper set and a bunch of custom scripts and key mappings I can take with my dotfiles to any new install in minutes and feel at home right away is my definition of comfy software these days

> In my opinion, the pillars of coziness (in no particular order) are:

> - Customizability

Customization is what I loved about software in the earlier days of the internet. It was just fun! It seemed like we were heading for a future where the average user could eventually customize just about anything, but we took a sharp turn away from that reality, unfortunately.

Most of those points seem to describe the majority of software created by individuals or small teams from the late 80s to early 2000s, except for "not-for-profit governance".

I’m not a fan of the section on governance.

I can certainly understand why you’d prefer to use community-driven software, but this post steers close to calling for-profit free software “not actually FOSS.”

FOSS is FOSS, regardless of whether the developer is solo or a megacorp, whether they accept patches or not, whether there is a proprietary build of the same product available or not.

You can disapprove of some of the things these developers do, but don’t water down the definition of FOSS by adding extra stipulations.

When I think of comfy software the first thing that comes to mind is the aesthetic of kinopio

I'm guessing you mean this kinopio? https://kinopio.club/

The monospace font reminds me of: https://musicforprogramming.net

OMG, how have i never heard of musicforprogramming.net? I've used my own playlists (takes time/work to curate, and sometimes end up being too "peppy"), as well as things like lo-fi hiphop (which is actually ok, but sometimes too sleep-inducing...sometimes)...but this music for programming is amazing! Thanks for sharing!

For me, cozy software is maintained by people that have forethought about what might be unnecessary technical debt. I've seen messy PRs in both open source and corporate organizations get merged without much review. The problem is the processes. Maybe it's apathy by the people leading these teams?

Learning to use a functional programming language is probably the most "comfy" move to make.

Alrighty; let’s be mindful of cutsie name. Specially in professional settings, not everyone share your taste.

For instance I find star war boring and simplistic, and the marvel franchises sound bling to me.

Currently, I’m replacing 14 micro services doing financial transactions processing.

Those 14 micro service where obviously way too splinter … but also they have Slavic name out of some polish folklore I think ?

I think there is puns with the name and the function of the service… but that context is lost to me and the team ( that set of software has been written elsewhere )

Comfy software is cute, and cute names are important.

Minor note: find takes a -delete argument so you don't have to do -exec rm {}\;. Just make sure to do it at the end because find will happily delete all your files if you put the options in the wrong order. Which is unergonomic but the devil you know.

I like some parts of the essay but I read "cute name" as "cutesy name" and cringe.

Also the "make common cases easy" with the example of "find" isn't so convincing. Find has a complete but complicated set of args, difficult to remember but cover every usage case, rather than just the common ones. ffmpeg is even more extreme that way. So I just use shell aliases to handle the common cases, rather than designing a whole different program for that.

Also, man pages are much worse than texinfo docs that you can actually navigate! They worked well when they were literally one printed page, but are a terrible format for complicated programs. Trying to find anything in the bash man page is a frequent exercise in frustration for me.

> In order for software to be comfy, the people who have the final say over what does and doesn't go into it shouldn't be beholden to a for-profit entity.

Seems doable. You can have a lot control over hobbies.

What is with this depression fad? The advised features in this post are sound advice for anyone. I'm a happy software developer, why shouldn't I have keyboard-focused navigation just like my depressed counterparts?

Being neuro-atypical is now virtuous.

Seems like that was just a silly headline that shouldn't have been put into submission title on HN (the page doesn't put it into its title tag at all).

I agree that the solution to depression is therapy, but it seems mean and heteronormative of you to say that someone who names their website "gay robot noises" has a problem. Perhaps you meant something else?

You're right, it was an insensitive thing to say.

It was possibly insensitively worded, but the entirety of your now-deleted comment nevertheless hinted at some deeper, intuitive perception. No matter how hard we try to politically correct our speech, some impressions are just rather clear. For reference: https://catgirl.ai/pages/robot/ (see „why?“ section in particular)

I genuinely wonder how one can voice said impressions in a way that is considered acceptable, without being hurtful, at the same time not missing the mark.

Anyway, software ergonomics is not the answer to depression. I believe this to be rather clear as well.

The very peculiar capitalisations in that page just seem very... Twitter. It's like a passive form of rebelling against the actual rules selectively, and capitalising random words they deem important. Fair enough Twitter doesn't have much in the form of text formatting (that I've seen), but on a personal website I'd hope you're writing MD or something where all of that is front and center.

As to your actual point, I really don't know. One question would be, do we need to say anything? I'd rather be silent than hurtful, though I fail at that semi-consistently. Even for someone within the first quarter of a century in age, I feel the goalposts for what is (considered) hurtful moving though, so I am terrified of aging away from the currently acceptable norms.

The latter part of your reply is important. My experience mirrors yours: the goalposts are constantly shifting. In such an environment you’re always going to find someone feeling offended by any remark. This inevitably leads to corporate gobbledygook and the loss of all meaning. Is saying nothing at all really a solution or just a way to avoid confrontation?

Remaining silent is certainly not a solution to the actual problem, for me it's just a heuristic to live a more convenient, less stressful life.

Being an immigrant, I was asked what the nice way to ask someone what their ethnicity was, options being things like "where are your parents from" or "what's your ethnicity". All I could say was that if I wanted to be offended, there's no way to ask me that question. If I'm assuming good faith, I'll look past cruder wording like "but where are you REALLY from?" There's so much context, emotions, and personality transmitted in face-to-face interactions, there's really no blanket rules. We lose ALL of that in online discussions, especially when dealing with character limits well-suited to rob conversations of context.

The other thing is the ability to look back through history with perfect recall. People change opinions, or are emotional, dealing with something, etc. In real life you slip up once and maybe get a puzzled look or get told to shut up. Online, well you may never escape it. I think we're trending too much towards an absolute sense of right and wrong, and stifling the possibilities to learn and evolve as a human. The pendulum will swing back over time.

For another anecdote, a friend of my partner's recently changed genders. A month or two later I remembered that, and asked my partner to check in on them and make sure they're ok. They weren't, and were having suicidal ideations, but greatly appreciated having someone check in on them which I considered a win. My partner wouldn't let up and just had to know why I asked her to do so, but when I told her it's a studied correlation, she was pissed at me for "stereotyping"... Just feels like I never escaped being a child who was constantly on the verge of getting in trouble with their abusive parent.

Sorry, that just turned into a rant at the end.

> Sorry, that just turned into a rant at the end.

On the contrary, thank you. It’s the very context you wrote about that’s often missing in online conversations. Your anecdote beautifully illustrates the absurdity trap too much well-meaning tolerance eventually trips.

I’m reminded of a Red Dwarf episode (Timewave, S12E03). A crew of a space ship decided to outlaw all criticism on board, going so far as too construct a machine extracting “the inner critic” from everybody. The Red Dwarf crew encounters them and wants to leave immediately after, because, quote: “nothing works here, especially the people.”

It’s quite straight-forward that the posts’ author struggles with mental health issues. By their own public admission (and accounting for preferred pronouns) it is transgender, hates its body and is rather inconsistent and confrontational. All fine by me. I don’t care how you find happiness or whatever else. But it should be entirely possible to remark upon those facts without experiencing retribution.

Yet somehow any remark regarding their mental health state gets self-censored by the first mention of insensitivity, no doubt fearing said retribution.

I worry about that.

A remark regarding the mental state of a random Internet blogger who literally self-identifies as a robot (or so it says, at any rate)? That strikes me as singularly pointless. I think retracting such remarks was the right call, in the spirit of keeping the discussion focused and avoiding distracting asides.

> a child who was constantly on the verge of getting in trouble with their abusive parent

That sentence says a lot about the current cultural climate (at least in the U.S. I'm guessing). Part of the abuse is that it's illogical or unpredictable, so you never know what triggers the parent/partner's anger, and when the pain/punishment will be delivered. It makes it risky to express any opinion - so the only sure way to not offend anyone is to stay silent. That stifles communication and discussion, except for narcissists who are illogically self-confident, often extreme on either side of the debate.

Nope I'm in Australia, but the cultural differences are eroding over time, so not too far off anyway. As Rammstein wrote, "We're all living in Amerika; Coca Cola, sometimes war."

> Part of the abuse is that it's illogical or unpredictable

Yeah, doing some introspection (seriously, bath tubs are magical) I realised I've lost a lot of social confidence and skills. The previous issue was one contributing factor, as well as roughly 2 years of very minimal social interaction at all. Wonder what the long term ramifications on society will be.

I relate to your comment - silence as a coping mechanism. I sometimes break out of it by being vocal and expressing my opinions, but I noticed it often invites attacks and "primate dominance" behavior from others. In my view, the social isolation definitely has made things worse culturally - I'm noticing a lot more bullying and people being jerks to each other. Tough times for sensitive souls.

There's a fundamental conflict between expressing real human interest in and concern for other people, and negotiating an ever-shifting maze of cultural taboos enforced by official and unofficial sanction. Maybe HR can put out a 40 page handbook for resolving this and verify compliance. Or maybe we should be generous to each other, regardless of the consequences.

Great rant, would read again.

People are complicated We are complicated

We often don't even understand ourselves, why do we feel the way we do But we don't have to understand others, to be respectful to them I feel, the thing is that this person, has yet to accept themselves, which.. at times, can take a lot of time

O well, I might also be missing a bit of context, because I can't see the original comment, as it seems to be replaced with a dot, so I apologize in that case. Sorry.

the author wants to be a robot bc of bodily self-hatred, there's obviously psychiatric problems, big ones

> Customizability

Too often the last thing I want from software I use for myself is customizability.

Many years ago Joel Spolsky called it [1]:

--- start quote ---

Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision. That means they will have to think about something and decide about it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but, in general, you should always try to minimize the number of decisions that people have to make.

This doesn’t mean eliminate all choice

--- end quote ---

There's another one on how customisation doesn't scale and doesn't transfer, but I can't find it now.

I personally want software that just works. Customisation often is an excuse for devs to not care about how software works, and to force the users into interminable twiddling with settings and options. No, thank you, I have enough of that at work.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des...

I couldn't disagree more. This is a situation where you very much can have your cake and eat it: customisability + excellent defaults.

If software A works is not customisable and works out of the box, and software B is customisable but has the same defaults as software A, then how is software B in any way inferior to A?

In an ideal world software B would be superior. In reality there's never a software B. These days there's rarely even a software A, to be honest

Customisability+Sane defaults is the best of both worlds

> Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision.

No. Options are a passive feature, they are hidden away in a menu. When software pushes decisions onto its users it's almost always a manipulative method to bully users into giving up their rights or money. Like apps spamming you with ads to push you towards a premium subscription, or the cookie popups on websites, or Windows pressuring you to register an account. All those negative examples are not problematic because of choice, but because corporations don't want users to make the right choice.

> No. Options are a passive feature, they are hidden away in a menu.

Unlike customisation which is... hidden away as options or options in config files.

> When software pushes decisions onto its users it's almost always a manipulative method to bully users into giving up their rights

Every customisation option is pushing choices onto its users.

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