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Comment by lijok | Hacker News Reader

Just use a proper IDE already

As someone who moved from jetbrains to sublime-text and then helix, I can safely say I'll never use a graphical IDE again. They're so damn resource heavy, a good text editor and a terminal window do great.

Why does a graphical IDE being resource heavy matter to you?

I hate graphical IDES because of how slow they are

* look through menu items * click something * everything is frozen for 5 seconds, fan start whirring.

Yeah I know. Junk my computer, get a new one, I'll pass.

Because it's running on my machine, using my resources.

You’re talking about it as if it’s costing you money

Do you take the same stance when your browser does the same? Have you disabled JS and embraced the digital amish lifestyle?

It does cost money. It costs in electricity, and in cost for hardware.

Yes, I do turn off JS in my browser.

I think a major problem in software development right now is the mindset you have. I want software that just does what it needs to and has as small of a footprint as it can to do that. I avoid topheavy software.

Just use emacs already

No, sorry, I value my time

I use proper IDE for near everything people say tmux makes possible but I still use tmux for various stuff, it's just a very useful tool.

Only one issue I had is that compared to screen default shortcuts are absolutely fucking awful for doing any kind of useful work so I had to remap most of them.

I just can't bring myself to spend hours mastering something like tmux, emacs, vim or the like (like learning a million keyboard shortcuts). I personally would rather spend those hours learning pretty much anything else; as in, I can't think of something more boring than learning a new text editor that's convoluted in the name of extreme productivity.

It seems to me that it's not a huge win in productivity; like, it's not like it's something that's going to make me 10x more productive. I spend more time thinking about the problem than writing code, for non-trivial problems. And even when I write code, it seems that using emacs or this tmux setup wouldn't be a huge win. Even if that saved time adds up, a bunch of hours at the end of the year is not going to make a huge difference definitely not something that's going to fundamentally alter my career.

It wont make you even 1.1x more productive. It will in fact make you less productive. But it looks cool so some people insist on using these clearly inferior setups.

Some productivity guru would say you have the correct mind set.

Chasing the perfect productive setup is a big sophisticated procrastination trap.

But tmux does bring in value. The fact it makes it possible to keep a remote session running even when you lose connectivity is worth learning at least 5% of that tool.

More advanced tmux/nvim/emacs/etc. setups are effectively a TUI IDE as opposed to a GUI IDE.

Different people have different preferences.

What if you have to develop on remote machines?

VSCode and JetBrains support this in various configurations.

You can edit the code locally and deploy via ssh. Or you can edit the code via ssh; or you can run the entire IDE remotely via ssh.

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