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Comment by rosser | Hacker News Reader

And what happens when you have to use the terminal on a machine that hasn't been "badassified"?

Yes. Things should not be customized because not everything is customized. Personally, when I drive a car I never adjust the seat or mirror positions. I also never store anyone's contact info in my phone because then I wouldn't know what to do if I lost my phone.

Seriously though, having aliases, scripts, or complex programs to help doesn't cripple you unless those things themselves force you into a state you are unable to reach out of.

I've never found myself on a new machine feeling helpless because I didn't have a shell with all the customizations I'm used to; I only felt some annoyance. Said annoyance was far less than the cumulative annoyance I felt before making those changes--and the amount they have saved me since.

I copy this into the boring terminal and run it: https://gist.github.com/AlexanderSelzer/ba487126454672a6596d

There's no zsh or iTerm2, but it is much easier to read. I guess it would be possible to make something that downloads the binaries, sets them up temporarily and opens them.

Things aren't as pretty, a lot of unnecessary <Tab>'s are pressed, and you sometimes have to Google things other people may instinctively know. I don't mind the Googling so much -- if it's important enough, I'll eventually learn it.

Always bring your bag of tricks with you. I have an easy to reach shellscript that I source when on a new/loaned shell. That way I can get my aliases, prompts, functions and everything else I've built to make my life easier.

Not much. If you do this you are usually pretty used to a normal terminal. I usually just tab way more then i should in bash. Thats it.

Exactly ... Back to basics.

Just learn how to use the terminal in its default form. We've been doing it for years efficiently.

I disagree. You should be able to use a basic terminal, but you're not living your developer life in a series of hotels - most of the work you're doing is probably on your own machine.

Dude. Optimize for your 99% use case. I spend ten minutes a week on someone else's machine. Does that really make it a bad idea to remove warts and add niceties to my machine? Assuming you aren't literally a stump it should be easy enough to go back to the defaults.

I wonder if it says something about how brittle software and their interactions tend to be: many very experienced computer users tend to promote a certain minimalism. Not for minimalism's sake, but apparently because their computers are in such a delicate and brittle state that any superfluous may brake it, and they have to expend a lot of effort to get it back to that same state. And also the fact that they aren't able to customize whatever other machine they have to use for any considerable time, probably because the administrator won't let you tweak anything (again, because it might break/introduce vulnerabilities etc. Again, it's in a brittle state).

You take a few minutes to get used to/remember how to use that terminal?

Not all of us are system administrators who need to be able to work on any Unix system at any times notice, and can only rely on things like ed being installed on them (That's at least the complaint I've read a lot of from people who are against some customization, or learning some kind of non-standardized/ubiquitous program. But what if you get stranded in the Sahara with no laptop, and you have to use a AT&T UNIX PC because the bedouins don't have anything else, and you desperately need to fix something on some boxes 1,000 miles away? Where's your fancy colour schemes new?).

sshrc or similar

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