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Comment by ykonstant | Hacker News Reader

Why not?

Imagine that the CLI tool you use most often every day - a compiler, a package manager, like that - adds animations like these in common operations. Now you have to wait for the animation to finish before you can continue your work. How do you feel about that?

Of course it would be obnoxious.

As an "about" screen, or in a opt-in funny theme why not !

The idea that anyone would use this during "common operations" is laughable, but as one offs during specific operations, maybe.

> The idea that anyone would use this during "common operations" is laughable

It's been a while since I dared assume anything at all was so obviously absurd that no one could ever think to do it - not least since significant portions of my career to date have consisted of cleaning up after people who had.

?? Why would I imagine that? What does this have to do with using animations in production? What you are saying is "how would you feel about using animations in inappropriate places?"

> What does this have to do with using animations in production? What you are saying is "how would you feel about using animations in inappropriate places?"

Production will always be an inappropriate place. QED.

I actually did some color animations to status bar of build tool I created while ago. In my opinion this distracted enough to make build feel faster

Edit: popular example of less invasive animations would be new docker cli, (pulling, buildx build)

Yeah. Animations covering time that'd be spent either way I see no problem with, so long as it's obvious the time would be spent either way. Animations that waste my time, not so much.

Better than either, of course, would be effort spent on speeding up the build in the first place. I realize that's less fun, though.

In general, the critical development path is not a place to thoughtlessly add friction.

Also, I don't want to even imagine how it would look on a SSH connection.

It’s trivial to add in a keypress that short circuits the animation. God, this website is full of the grumpiest people on the planet.

It's not grumpy to prefer function over form in a tool. People optimize for different things. GP's comment is reasonable; they're optimizing for something different than you.

Those of us who live in the terminal do it because it's the fastest, most convenient option, not because it's pretty or to appear 1337. Animations like these get in the way. Cool project, but I would never use it.

Prod should be as robust and straightforward as possible; no distractions, no noise, no extra overhead. This is neat, but not useful, and it adds distractions and delays.

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