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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

People question why I use vim and live in the terminal. Well... because everything opens up instantly, and I can run email, spotify, my editor, debugger, pdf reader, file browser (with image previewing), and everything I need while using less than a gig of ram and barely any CPU usage. Not only that, but I get to make the things work in the way I want them to, not have to constantly hunt down random menus. If I'm ever confused I just press ? and 99% of the time find the answer faster than it takes to reach for the mouse. Even a shitty TUI usually is faster and easier to use than many GUIs. Yes, there are times GUIs are better. I don't want a TUI Gimp, but for a lot of stuff, I don't need the bloat.

It's because I don't like the Chinese torture you're referring to. We're programmers, we don't have to live that way.

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I was going to agree until I realised that I’ve aliased emacs to open emacsclient and do exactly what office is planning on doing.

you win this one vim, but I’ll get you next time.

I always say that there's only one reason to use vim over emacs, and that's that vi is on almost every machine you touch. It's an optional POSIX command[0], but it is as common as `more` or `type`. Though that is a bit of a lie. The other reason is that you're more likely to find vim bindings in random programs than emacs :P

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands

As someone who came from vim, I find evil to be great tbh.

Why go to emacs then? What do you get that vim couldn't provide?

Emacs probably enables more functionality than vscode or any other tool. You can literally browse the web or send emails from emacs - I’m not saying you should, but the potential for performing tasks are infinite.

Vim has by far the better default user interface, though.

Neat. I'm interested in your TUI setup. What do you use?

Nothing too fancy. I'm not going to dox myself, I like to (pretend to) keep this account anonymous so I'm not going to drop my dotfiles (though I am pretty proud of them). But I don't do anything too fancy. vim, neomutt, spotify-player, yazi, and tdf for pdfs (not still mixed about this one). I'll also maybe play around with a few for random tools but I usually don't use more than these.

Day to day I'm listening to music, reading emails, internet, and writing programs with vim (half my time I'm ssh'd into other machines anyways. I do ML research). So I got pretty much everything covered except Slack and Signal

Thanks! Your use case sounds similar to mine (and some the same workload).

How are you doing Spotify?

I'm using spotify_player[0]. It is pretty bare-bones but honestly, what do you need? I got album art, a progress bar, and can search and go to my library

Note that if you google you will probably get spotify-tui[1] which DOES NOT work

[0] https://github.com/aome510/spotify-player

[1] https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui

side note: man... I really wish I had the time to write or rewrite some TUIs. I'm sure I'm not the only one... Problem with a lot of open source is that they're side projects. I'd imagine there could be state of things could be a lot better if some small org just paid a few engineers to make and maintain a few of them.

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