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Comment by aiurtourist | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love to see people iterate on the boring old command line, this will never catch on.

1) It's too difficult to remember all the tricks to make it useful, and the cost of memorizing tricks that I saw in the first screencast isn't worth the efficiency it provides.

2) It's too difficult for new users to remember the tricks that are supposedly "better." It's a lot like Python vs. Perl -- Perl is a really smart and clever language, but you can type just a few characters more to write Python and it'll be a lot clearer as to what's going on.

The one exception to all of this is the MySQL stuff I saw. The MySQL prompt has sucked for a long, long time, and building SQL queries is something you do iteratively anyway.

All of the above said, I still think this is pretty neat. But I won't use it.

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It may gain a following yet. There are two schools of thought when it comes to productivity tools such as shells, editors, and programming languages. Some think they should be optimised for ease of learning; others, instead for power and efficiency to those who already know them.

As a user of Emacs, Blender, and Perl, I’m probably in the latter camp. And this tool seems like something I might enjoy using. But I don’t think that, as a rule, things should be designed this way unless there’s a very good reason to do so, backed by user research. I would not design a programming language like Perl, for example, because “people who program” will always outnumber “programmers” and it’s best to cater to the majority.

Couldn't both of those complaints apply to, say, Vim, the golden child of HN?

One big difference is that Vim has been a de facto standard for a very long time, and it's ubiquitous - you can trust just about any server to have vim installed - so the investment to learn it has a much more guaranteed pay-off.

I agree. In fact, vi is a standard UNIX utility - see the POSIX-1.2008 specification:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi...

vim is the most popular implementation of vi, with lots of added bells and whistles

I'd say learn vi first; then learn the vim bells and whistles.

I have resources for learning vi at http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi.htm

I'm really into improving efficiency and I enjoy teaching people how to use vi. The class materials are publicly available and are based on Bill Joy's original paper introducing vi:

Basic vi: http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi/class/

Advanced vi: http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi/class/advanced.html

My next vi class will be in Columbus, Ohio at Ohio Linux Fest in a couple of weeks (http://ohiolinux.org/olfi2012/classes/editing-with-vi)

There is rarely any point learning vi if you are only ever going to use vim. (On many systems, vi is just a symlink to vim anyway).

If I had a nickel for every time someone justified not using vim's features by invoking a bizarre imaginary scenario where they were using vi to twiddle bits on a downed snowflake machine, I could buy a few fancy coffees.

Unless you work in an all windows environment :(

My condolences. I know your pain.

Solaris has only vi. Not vim. :-)

I'm using "PLSQL Developer" at work instead of console prompt (sqlplus in my case), and it works in similiar way to xexi (but the results are in tabbed, excel-like grid in the bottom - you can edit it, sort, filter, etc, instead of right inside the main window). But the interaction is similiar to that of screencast - you write a few queries in the main window, click and CTRL+ENTER to run a query, you can at any time change them like in normal editor, or edit results and save them if you want.

It works great, much faster than regular prompt. Shame it's only for oracle db.

> 2) It's too difficult for new users to remember the tricks that are supposedly "better." It's a lot like Python vs. Perl -- Perl is a really smart and clever language, but you can type just a few characters more to write Python and it'll be a lot clearer as to what's going on.

Doesn't this same argument lead to the conclusion that new users won't use Perl over Python or --to put it more inflammatorily-- that Python killed Perl? This is surely demonstrably incorrect.

This is purely anecdotal, but learning Perl is currently on my backburner in part due to its reputation. I did use it a bit in a bioinformatics class, and I have edited a few small Perl scripts, but Python simply works for me. Perl's reputation, if you could call it that, has negatively impacted my desire to learn the language.

(Maybe I'm worse off for it? Who knows. I mean no harm and don't want to impinge on anyone's feelings. I just don't see myself picking up Perl anytime soon. Just my own two cents, FWLIW.)

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