Hackers' screen shots | Hacker News Reader

Hackers' screen shots

49 pointsdavidw101 comments

After reading the article on fonts, I thought it might be kind of fun to share screen shots of our working environment. Just remember to edit out anything sensitive!

View on HN

As of now, the technology count is:

 Languages:
 4 Ruby
 4 Python
 4 C/C++
 2 Java
 2 Lisp
 1 HTML
 1 Scheme
 1 Mathematica
 1 Javascript

 Editors:
 8 Emacs
 5 Vim
 1 Visual Studio
 1 Eclipse
 1 Netbeans

 Browsers:
 8 Firefox
 2 Opera
 1 IE

 OS:
 11 *nix
 8 MacOS
 2 Windows

Possibly modulo a couple of miscountings. If people had multiple programs open (like one person with both Firefox and IE, or my own setup with Windows + Ubuntu VM), both are counted. I omitted obvious jokes, like the Commodore 64 screenshots or Don Knuth's desktop. And it only includes editors I could identify, so whatever you Mac folks are using to edit your Ruby isn't included.

Nice. My desktop is a few years old, so subtract one from the C/C++ camp. I use python and ruby equally, though, so it doesn't help break that tie.

Most of these people seem to be using TextMate. Personally, I prefer SubEthaEdit.

I seriously don't understand how you people can work with all the visual clutter. I like a much more naturalistic approach:

http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/217/workspacefh6.gif

I used to live with visual clutter before I discovered virtual desktops. I now usually keep my windows maximized and just switch desktops when I need to go to a different window.

Nice. http://inglua.com/blog/images/c64.png

Lack of syntax highlighting is very easy on the eyes.

I think its time to make a new texteditor / micro-ide

I'm sure my desktop would look pretty stark to most people. That's the way I like it though. Basically I only ever have two windows open, both maximized - Emacs and FireFox. I spend 90% of my time in Emacs - this is what it looks like:

http://abstractnonsense.com/desktop.png

(that's not my code btw - it's a random python library).

If I knew of a way to hide even more superfluous stuff (window decorations, the menu bar) I would do it.

Wow - couldn't you squeeze in some more emacs windows on the right to visit more files at once? Or is that kind of thing just noise/distraction? I could certainly see some people preferring the simplicity to my more noisy 3 emacs windows and 4 rxvt's.

Yup, it's just noise to me. I prefer to have the other buffers loaded in Emacs, but not displayed on the screen where I'll be distracted by them.

My perfect dev environment would go as far as blanking out everything in my peripheral vision too - maybe a set of VR goggles that only displays an Emacs window, dead center ;-)

I do the single plain window of emacs thing too (though I use Terminal, not the built-for-mac Emacs GUI, and I only go 90 chars wide on my window). I usually run three UNIX shell buffers inside of emacs, in addition to all the source code buffers. I never go to the mouse while in Emacs (because it doesn't do anything), which helps me move quickly.

<snobbery>I get a bit frustrated when I need to look over someone's shoulder while s/he is doing some programming related task. So many people move very slowly thru their environments. I want to show them the way...</snobbery>

I wasted about 2 hours of my life once trying to trick out my Mac to be that "one Emacs window and nothing else" setup that you're talking about. I never really found anything that worked, though.

This may seem like an obvious point, but have you tried Linux (or another Free OS) with a tiling window manager? OS X does give you a nice prepackaged experienced, but if you love to tinker and have complete control to customize anything, Linux is ideal. And you can always dual boot, if you just want to try it out part time. =)

The thing is, when I'm doing anything but programming (web surfing, watching a DVD, playing music, etc.) I want the smooth, easy-to-use, pleasant-looking experience that I get on a Mac. I periodically try Unix window managers to see how they're doing, but they honestly always seem pretty clunky to me.

But let's say for a minute that I did go the Unix window manager route. What would you recommend if I wanted to have one "mode" where basically everything is stripped away (no menu bar, no windows, nothing -- just a shell), and another mode which was your standard GUI? It would have to be fast to switch between the two.

Install X11 on your Mac and set it to run in fullscreen mode. Then install xemacs or whatever and you're set. When you're in X11, fullscreen programming. When you Cmd-tab away, OS X goodness.

If you want a tiling WM, ratpoison runs just fine under X11.app on the Mac -- and you can have it replace the standard Quartz WM via .xinitrc

Switch to Linux :)

http://akkartik.name/desktop.html

That's an utterly bizarre font you're using - otherwise... nice!

I like modd. No other font is as legible at 9pt. I like that 0 and O look different, as do 1 and l. I like that all characters have some slight asymmetry - characters with character ;)

http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts

http://www.csh.rit.edu/~apox/images/screenshots/20071031.png

My four desktops merged into one image. I'm using FreeBSD+ion.

+1 for ion! brilliant window manager. I don't know how I could be as productive without it.

I love the emacs color scheme.

as an RIT CS grad ('03), I cackled when i saw your desktop.. very CSH :)

Girl Talk: excellent choice of hacking music.

Downloading now. If you're wrong then die. Free beer otherwise.

he was right.

this is from some loser named Don Knuth: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/screen.jpeg

This would be better:

http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/screenshots.en.html

http://64.74.153.35/~zak/screen.png

Normally 1680x1050, but I'm using an external monitor until I find time to get my laptop's LCD fixed.

Can you live with that font? No anti-aliasing and Courier New?

It was good enough for...

Actually, yes. It's quite readable and fairly compact. I've tried a few other fonts (most of the ones mentioned in the fonts thread on here) and found most of them take up more space or are less readable. Dejavu Sans Mono might look better with anti-aliasing turned on, but most of the time I've found anti-aliasing just makes fonts look blurry.

Lucida Console is both more compact (the reason I use it) and more readable.

Just my 2 cents.

Tada: http://inglua.com/blog/screenshot.png

Need to increase test coverage :)

Wow, Mac OS X in non-widescreen. For some reason, seeing it like that is a jarring experience.

I hate widescreen, I'd use portrait mode if my monitor could pivot.

My emacs-centric working environment:

http://brlewis.com/y/2007/devscreen.png

It's slightly contrived, in that I usually have only one buffer open. I wanted to show that my environment involves switching back and forth between my ideas.txt file where I aggressively prioritize, and the actual BRL and Scheme files where the real coding is done. A large portion of my work is done in 35-minute train rides.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/133/396296975_1f2e6f41a6_b.jp...

Linux running Xfce.

Couple of VMs a Xnest and DVD player. And I say again the current way we layout apps is broken. I have a wide screen monitor and most apps do not resize. I anybody working on something to fix this so that an app designed for 640x480 renders a reasonable size on my screen.

http://aycu09.webshots.com/image/32248/2004585555465429860_r...

Software: Ubuntu 7.10, Netbeans, Opera. Hardware: 2 x 1280x1024 monitors.

Edit: Whoa, apparently webshots doesn't like PNGs. Try this link instead.

http://img444.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshotzh0.png

Here's mine:

http://www.stanford.edu/~brianrue/workspace.png

I just alt-tab between Zend and firefox/konsole; at work I run another screen of Firefox off my windows laptop. I don't know how a lot of you can live with so much clutter on your screen, it drives me crazy.

you vi/emacs/console guys can hate, but deep down inside you wish your ide was as tight as this :) :)

http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/4349/desktopel7.jpg

yuck.

stuff like code folding and automagical code generation encourage all the wrong habits. Simple, readable, and reused code is "tight".

An upvote alone cannot express how much I agree. I spend a lot more time reading code (even my own) than I do writing it. Code generation and concise languages reduce the effort of writing code by similar amounts, but concise languages reduce the effort of reading code by an order of magnitude or two.

I don't know if that's true. What reduces the effort of reading code is using the right abstractions in the code. Concise languages can make some code incredibly hard to understand. I'm switching between Python and Lisp these days but I have never had problems reading things like Java because of the verbose syntax. I do however have problems reading Perl or badly written code in any language.

concise != short.

You can have short code by using single-letter variable names and avoiding whitespace. It doesn't gain you anything. But concise code says exactly what it needs to say and no more, and that can be much more readable than lots of boilerplate.

Up to a point, avoiding whitespace does gain you something. It means you can fit more code on the screen at one time. In languages with C-like syntax, I've taken to putting consecutive close-braces on the same line, at the indentation level matching the outermost brace. It's surprising how much it helps.

I disagree. The amount gained to having more on the screen is much less than what is lost to readability. Whitespace is your friend.

I do exactly the opposite, where each bracket gets its own line, never going on the same line as code. This helps create an excellent visual division of blocks on the page.

I completely disagree. Objective-C is an incredibly readable language precisely because it is verbose. Message parameters have labels, what a concept!

Heh. I think it's funny that the trend in modern IDEs is for your code to get squished into a smaller and smaller box in the middle, surrounded by a ton of random crap. It's the exact opposite to the environment I strive for.

(also, "Solution Explorer"? That was the best name they could come up with?)

To be fair, he seems to have enough space for code. horizontally at least. Monitors today have plenty of space for random crap. But the bottleneck isn't real estate anymore, it's focus.

What we need is for the other windows to gradually fade out when focus is in this one for a while. One of the video plugins/sites on tv-links had this feature - as you watched a show for a while the rest of the screen would gradually fade out.

Or we could go with two vertical panes: http://akkartik.name/desktop.html :)

Compiz has an option to do exactly that. It's called ADD Helper. Unfortunately, XGL doesn't perform very well on my laptop.

your font makes me want to stab my eyes out... otherwise, nice. :)

Response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74768

I don't know, in my 1900x1200 window I have quite a lot of room for things besides the code on the side, like a REPL window, etc.

Yes, it's called "Solution Explorer" because when you use Team Foundation Server you open up solutions. So "Solution Explorer" is very appropriate.

Are you speaking English? It looks that way, but I can't parse "you open up solutions". Solutions of/to what? And how does one "open" a solution? I'm also not sure what a "Team Foundation Server" is. I know all of the words separately, but put them together, and they no longer have any meaning for me. I think I missed a trend or a meme or a memo or a brochure or something.

I'm not intending to be a smartass, I really just have no idea what you just said, and looking at the screenshot doesn't really clarify. "Solution Explorer" looks like a file browser, to me.

In Visual Studio parlance, a 'solution' is a set of projects that logically belong together. For example, in a web site, your actual web app may be one project. A back-end scheduling task may be another, etc..

All of these together form a 'solution'. So, in that sense, the term 'Solution Explorer' kinda makes sense if you squint right. Whether or not the word 'solution' is appropriate at all is a different issue entirely...

Ah, OK. So, a "solution" is made up of many projects, which is made up of many files? It sounds very enterprise-y. I'll promise to stay out its way, as long as it stays out of mine.

And I guess I can get by without knowledge of what a Team Foundation Server is or does.

Bad Vista.

Here's mine. Also Visual Studio.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1810430961&size=...

Page is private.

Here's mine:

http://www.dedasys.com/Screenshot.png

That's about what mine looks like, except I usually have a browser window under the main terminal window, and I only use two workspaces instead of ten (!)

The browser is located in the lower left hand workspace, so it's just an alt-down arrow away from the workspace.

Ubuntu! Great Choice.

I don't think 10 desktops is enough... best to double it. =)

here's mine:

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/3408/picture2jd3.png

Sorry for all the obfuscation.

Tiger, TextMate, Terminal.app, Locomotive, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium, Twitterpod. A few more in the titlebar (Desktopple, SpritedAway (obviously turned off for now), MenuMeters), and plenty more in the Dock.

is that adium as your chat window? if that is ichat how'd you get it to be borderless like that?

yep, it's adium. "concise" contact list style, "group bubbles" window style.

That's a beautiful color scheme. Where/how can I get it?

which color scheme? if you mean the rainbow gradient I used to cover my private info, that's just one of the default patterns built into photoshop.

Adium is using the standard "Aqua" theme.

TextMate uses the standard "Twilight" theme.

I mean the one for syntax highlighting, which I suppose is TextMate (I don't use it).

Incidentally, there is a vim version here: http://niw.at/articles/2006/08/06/twilight

http://andrewfong.com/stuff/Picture%201.png

Firefox is hidden and gets called up as necessary. If I have access to a separate monitor, it gets shoved onto there.

Leopard, of course, with 4 spaces and xcode split-screen, Ubuntu 7.10 running under parallels. http://tildeslash.com/images/screenshot.png

Eclipse, vim and Opera. I like my syntax highlighting scheme, but not many people like colors as much as I do.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/59/workspace.PNG

Wow, that really is colorful, isn't it!

I have no clue how so many of you are only working on one monitor. Maybe you've never tried using two, but there's absolutely no way I could ever code again on just one.

The difference is night and day.

I've tried working on multiple monitors, several times. It doesn't work for me.

Just curious, but what doesn't work for you about multiple monitors?

I'd be interested to hear why as well.

I find it's invaluable as you can have a web browser on one side and your code on the other.

I concur. I can't believe how many single monitor setups there are.

I am also surprised that more people don't use split screen setups where they can view multiple pages of code within the same window (ala emacs,gvim, Visual Studio). I prefer to have around four but atleast two views of code open at once.

Some of us value the ability to hack in bed over the extra screen real estate.

Screen real estate is like a drug. Addiction creeps up on you quickly, and the more you have the more you think you need. I used to be perfectly content with one 17" monitor. Now I'm looking for a bigger desk so that I can add a fourth 22" LCD.

A fourth?

Wow. That's awesome.

I tried it and it made my neck hurt. I prefer a virtual desktop if I want multiple workspaces. Why move your head when you can make the screen move for you?

http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/screenshots/ion3-2.png

OK, not really my desktop. But ion is quite cool.

About 50% of my programming time is spent staring at a maximized vim instance, and about 30% staring at a maximized firefox instance: http://jey.kottalam.net/tmp/screenshot.png

I actually do run ion3. The only problem I've had so far is that some of the Alt+ keyboard shortcuts interfere with some Emacs shortcuts. One off the top of my head: Alt+G.

I just remap/unmap the ion shortcuts to get out of the way of emacs. I have a friend who swears by setting ion's Mod1 to capslock, but my pinky just can't handle that.

Set Ion's mod key to super (aka the windows key) and everything starts playing nicely :p

http://billmill.org/static/images/desktop.png

my work workspace (OSX) http://nikolajbaer.us/media/desktop.jpg

at home its similar, but xfce4 terminals and pidgin on xubuntu.

viewbug?

ah, a project for a client.. damn i tried to snuff out things like that. It's just yet another media sharing site, we (I) built it in django with ffmpeg.

there was some tutorial on recovering original text from gaussian blurs i saw out there, i.e. blurring isn't like a hash function. to be safe you have to totally black it out.

Mine: http://labs.diffle.com/screenshot.png

SDF has something like this: http://www.deskshots.org/

Standard Emacs/terminal/Firefox on my laptop:

http://img524.imageshack.us/my.php?image=desktopak6.png

When I'm docked at work, I usually have Emacs on the monitor and terminal on my laptop screen.

My setup in Mathematica...

http://www.programnature.org/Screenshot.png

http://webdever.net/screen.png

I could use a bigger screen...

http://www.goladus.com/images/wokr1.png

Cygwin, firefox, emacs, C, yacc, putty, outlook, python. (There's php in one of the emacs windows)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/67154802@N00/2473330790/sizes/l...

i have 6 spaces open on my macbook pro. i run firefox, safari and mozilla. use adium, transmit, photoshop, terminal, and ituens on a daily basis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com