I Still Live in the Terminal | Hacker News Reader

I Still Live in the Terminal

blog.tacoda.dev

23 pointstacoda28 comments

> No adapter, no integration, no plugin. The OS is the integration.

> I still live in the terminal

But you frequent the fish market at chatgpt dot com, I suppose.

>alias gp='git push'

I prefer CLI over GUI but I also prefer to have a life over making my life harder. On that same context, I prefer nano over vi/vim any time.

Now, the problem with aliases is that the more you use the more addicted you get. If you have to touch another terminal without those aliases, you will automatically try the aliases you are used to or create them so you can do whatever you have to do.

Meaning, it is not a practice easy to transfer to other environment. zsh + auto complete makes your life a lot easier and you won't forget the commands.

> I prefer CLI over GUI but I also prefer to have a life over making my life harder.

I think this is actually a really profound statement. Many people seem to get caught up in trying to take the most efficient path when you could take a somewhat less efficient path that requires much less time. It can become a form of yak-shaving.

Now, don't get me wrong: there's absolutely a benefit in investing time to learn efficient methods. But life is also short, and you've gotta choose where you invest.

Life is longer than a lot of people seem to think. I put a lot of effort into configuring vim and bash... 20 years ago maybe? And now I barely think about it, but the changes I made have made me more efficient and effective throughout those 20 years. Go ahead and put some time into figuring out how you use a tool and make scripts or aliases for using them... if you invest in good tools you will get decades of use out of, instead of chasing dumb fads, you'll just keep compounding your efficiency.

It certainly helps that vim and bash, unlike some software, doesn't just go and change its config every few years!

I used to believe this for like 10 years. And I never had any custom environment. But then I was at a job where I was forced to create a custom dev environment, because theirs was awful. And then I had to transfer my scripts to another machine, and it turns out, it was actually really easy (just have a git repo you can pull from anywhere). I wasted 10 years with a subpar dev environment.

I'm actually at the point now where I just can do `curl https://website.com/my_environment.sh | bash`, and it sets everything up for me. So even if I SSH into a machine for a brief period of time I'll have my environment with me there too.

zsh has alias plugins pretty easy to migrate your dotfiles but yeah its too custom then

That’s fair. I usually have a separate alias file in my config. But it’s really a convenience for me.

> Pipes are not a feature. They’re a worldview.

> Text is the universal interface

No wonder we don't get better GUIs if people keep turning the terminal into a religion.

The problem is that people turned "worse GUI" into a religion. We had good GUIs, but the GUI people all decided that making the GUIs worse was a brilliant thing to do

The problem with GUIs is exactly why CLIs are preferred by many:

- GUIs keep radically changing how they look, at times even removing features, meanwhile some CLI interfaces haven't change in my lifetime

- CLIs are more often designed with synergetic effects in mind, they become part of ecosystems. Meanwhile you get the feeling many GUI applications start having a hard time saving a file to a local hard drive

- the filye types you will tend towards on a CLI are human readable and text based and can be opened in 50 years time without special vendor support

I am not that old, but the reason I like the CLI is simply because I feel GUIs come and go without improving the ecosystem they are in.

> some CLI interfaces haven't change in my lifetime

But many others have, `ps -ef` vs `ps -aux` is one example. Nowadays, most systems support both, but not so long ago you'd need to remember which one to use depending what system you were on.

> Text is the universal interface

The nipple is the universal interface. Everything else is an abstraction.

lol

For some reason, I can only scroll down a little bit on medium articles and then firefox freezes that tab and won't let me scroll up or down. I assume it has something to do with adblock, but I've noticed it a lot recently.

It's likely the overlay that is asking for your email address to subscribe to the author's content.

terminal is the only way for me... 100% control year after year.

> Same two-letter command in my muscle memory. make run. make test. make migrate

Should surely be "two-word"?

Both actually. It is incorrect. It’s two words, but I also have an alias that makes it two letters. Thanks for pointing this out.

for me, it's less 'still' and more 'again'. claude code + API tokens means i no longer have to suffer the user-hostile design of many webpages. using full-screen claude code feels like finding my old DOS teddy from childhood buried in the back of a closet.

Me too, because a lot of storage infrastructures need terminal.

Doesn't everyone?

No. I prefer a GUI for anything that isn't going to be scripted (which is to say, most tasks that I do). Easier to work in, and much more discoverable than a CLI.

I agree with this. If it’s text, I do it in the terminal, but I still use GUI for Chrome or Zoom. I think the discoverability depends on the product. On the other hand, in the terminal, it’s a help flag or a man page.

AI slop. There are many tell-tale signs that chatgpt or claude was being used. It’s very difficult to read, as it regurgitates the same thing over and over.

Absolutely!

Me too!

I'm so done with no-content slop articles on HN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com