Comment by theideaofcoffee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theideaofcoffee | Hacker News Reader

theideaofcoffee

I've reached a point where having well-coordinated colors in my terminal just doesn't concern me, I find it to be a waste of time now. I used to be all about finding the perfect scheme, with the perfect terminal font, cool transparency and whatnot, now I just don't really care. I have more interesting things to work on. Whatever, if you want to, you do you.

Maybe because I've had to work on enough remote consoles without any, or limited, color support where I'm more concerned about the problem at hand than which shade of blue is being output for directories. Ok, I'll admit I adjust the default apple terminal 'pro' scheme colors a bit, adding a bit of contrast to the background because I'm in it all day, but beyond that, nothing. I find coloring has little to no positive effect on my productivity, and in some instances, hinders it. No colors on ls, I actually get a bit annoyed when color escapes reach stdout via logs now, hah. Hell, that extends even to my $PS1. I've never bothered to update it on this system. Crotchety, grizzled ops person perspective maybe?

For me it’s about utility. I don’t buy any arguments saying don’t use aliases or colors because others won’t have them. 90% of my terminal interaction is on my terminal so I’m not too bothered.

It takes me maybe 10min when I get a new computer (usually Mac) to have Oh My Zsh and Powerlevel10k installed on my machine, configure p10k with the awesome setup wizard, change to my coding font, and tweak my background and foreground to dark teal/off-white. After that I never have to touch it again and it looks amazing for the rest of my working days. The default PS1 mods from p10k giving me directory context, info on k8s, docker, and python venv, along with info on last run cmd like exit code and runtime, are all just so valuable and I got them for basically free.

I can understand not wanting to constantly tweak it and I agree with that but I would have to disagree that making any customization is a waste of time.

I agree and disagree with you. Same 'grumpy old sysop' energy. Same as you I, ssh into 100 different servers on dozens of client networks. Too many have a stupid amount of restrictions in the name of security that prevent changes or enforce settings. i.e. One client has a 'forced' PS1 output that shows: RAM free/total HD space free/total CPU load TOP cpu item Previous command

All with obnoxious colours AND blinking if a threshold gets met. .bashrc (and associated)is read-only (and) overwritten at every login.

But, I can `source .my-env` And bring sanity to my session.

I'd rather have a 'default-plain' then some forced-bling that a dev thought was cool 20 years ago.

I don't bother about the colors because white on black is excellent for me and I prefer not to have the output colorized. Makes things easy. :)

I lie a little... I do disable colorization when possible, or set everything to be white on black when I can't just turn it off.

Pretty much same, but over time I've switched to dark on light in terminal. Easier for me to read these days. Still use "night mode" often on my phone, mostly to save battery (OLED).

This is how I feel about virtually all "personalize your environment" discussions. The sheer level of effort to ship preferred shells and tools and aliases and dotfiles and color schemes around the thousands of nodes I touch in a given year makes it all feel like a losing bet. It means every little change feels like a new insurmountable chore I just placed on myself.

Now, yeah, in the case of the terminal, it's probably not so bad because the remote system _probably_ won't override my settings, or it's probably relatively easy to force my side to take priority, but it still falls into the bucket of "huge chores with minimal payoff".

Also crotchety, grizzled ops person who invests too much time into solving the problem right in front of them and not enough time into stepping back and engaging in possibly-fruitful sidequests.

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