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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I edit text for a living. I've recently moved from a content management system to markdown files on my computer. It's insane how fast the latter feels. Everything just works instantly, and the software is built for power users.

I wonder how much productivity is lost looking at spinners on single-page apps, and clicking around web interfaces instead of modifying files.

I really feel that when I do my accounting. These 1-3 second delays between pages add up to a lot.

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I'm an Asciidoc man myself, but yes yes yes and yes. I say that as someone who gets their paycheck because of these overblown CMS/CCMS[1] turds. At the moment I'm supporting a gigantic PTC integration, but virtually every single functionality we're trying to establish could be done in Asciidoc and Visual Studio Code in seconds . . and these are things that - if they ever work - will take Windchill entire days to perform, and never, ever accurately.

But the writers and managers want clicky buttons and drop down menus, so here we all are. Article definitely hit a chord for me.

[1] Yes! Asciidoc is quite capable of acting like a CCMS . . if that's something you genuinely need. Component Content is another culty idea, something that really shouldn't be used for very much - if anything - but management acts like it's the second coming. And the effups it can (and probably will) introduce are colossal.

My favourite part is doing a find/replace that would have been impossible before, and fixing dozens of pages in one go. Then I can triple check everything before I commit and push. Oh and it works offline on a really old MacBook.

Yesterday I was testing generating audio files for glossary pages. It took an hour, because it's just another function called by the static dite generator. "For every word in this context, call the text to speech API". So elegant!

> I really feel that when I do my accounting. These 1-3 second delays between pages add up to a lot.

It's funny you should mention that. Year before last was the first year I decided to itemize every single expenditure. I did it using quickbooks, and it was a nightmare. It only took one time to decide never to do that again.

This year I itemized everything using beancount in emacs, and it's incredible how much easier it is to handle everything. Even having to download each bank period as a CSV and run it through a python script, I've just had a better time doing it and am able to more flexibly handle and analyze my finances.

I have yet to find out whether I can easily work with an accountant using ofx files exported from this setup though

I match business transactions to invoices every month. Then I invoice half a dozen clients.

This involves a lot of clicking around and a lot of network delays. They recently improved the UI but it's still slower than it should be.

The older I get, the more I understand graybeards and their command line workflows. Once it's committed to muscle memory, it's like a sharp knife in the hands of a chef.

One man's "lost productivity" is another's salary. I agree though, so many things have interactive interfaces when other modes of interaction would be preferable, not to mention that describing UI operations typically requires screenshots to understand what is going on.

> One man's "lost productivity" is another's salary

If that’s how we’re spinning it, forget the spinners and text editors altogether. Bring back the quill pen; surely it will restore many salaries!

I don't think quill pen manufacturing comes close to the jobs provided by modern software dev. One pen can do so many tasks!

Indeed, it adds up long-term and across people, so scales up horizontally too into many human-hours gone, evaporated into UI/X abyss.

have u used or considered an eink display?

Why?

You said you edit text for a living, so I was curious if you ever tried one.

They're easier on the eyes, I've been looking to buy one but don't know anyone who tried them firsthand