robenkleene

> That is an awfully large amount of text for what amounts to an admission that Logic Pro is lower quality software than Pro Tools.

I definitely didn't say this. Pro Tools likely has higher marketshare than Logic Pro, but I don't think anyone would conflate that with quality. I only brought up marketshare because you framed Logic Pro as being unpopular, which is just objectively not true.

> I'm sorry to say it, but I genuinely think you're detached from the way professionals evaluate software.

I literally think I've spent more time trying to understand this than practically anyone else e.g., https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions... but also my blog archives https://blog.robenkleene.com/archive/, it's one of the main subjects I think about and write about.

Note that how professionals evaluate software is tangential to what "quality" means in the context of software. E.g., I don't think anyone would argue Adobe is the paragon of software quality, but they're arguably the most important GUI software there is for creative professionals.

Both topics are very interesting to me, what software professionals use and why, and what constitutes quality in software.

> In the other response, you're telling off a perfectly valid criticism of Apple software because they won't fulfill your arbitrary demand for a better-looking DAW. Are you even engaging with the point they're trying to make?

I'm not sure what this means, who's talking about a "better-looking DAW" and which point am I not engaging with?

Sorry, you're 100% right, I misread your comment.

What specifically does Microsoft do that Apple should do?

You've only addressed something like 30% of the issues I asked about (although I'm honestly impressed you got that far), e.g., I wouldn't call Apple Mail an application designed to managed a collection of emails on disk. Isn't the important question here whether the emails were still stored on the server? E.g., or were they using POP?

Yes, I use Ableton Live every day.

> It lacks support for lots of plugins and hardware, and costs loads for what is essentially a weaker value prop than Bitwig or Ableton Live.

This is an obviously silly statement, not only is Logic Pro competitively priced ($200, relative to $100-$400 for Bitwig, $99-$750 for Live), but those applications obviously have different focuses than Logic Pro (sound design and electronic music, versus the more general-purpose and recording focus of Logic Pro, also you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't think Logic Pro comes with the best suite of stock plugins of any DAW, so the value prop angle is a particularly odd argument to make [i.e., Logic Pro is pretty obviously under priced]).

But all this isn't that important because many of these applications are great. DAWs are one of the most competitive software categories around and there are several applications folks will vehemently defend as the best and Logic Pro is unequivocally one of them.

> Most bedroom musicians are using Garageband or other cheap DAWs like Live Lite, and the professional studios are all bought into Pro Tools or Audition.

This is old, but curious if you have a better source for your statement https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/06/10/2015-digital-audio-w...

Found a more recent survey https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/2024-d...

> We can see that Pro Tools for music is the most popular choice, with Logic for music second and Pro Tools for post coming third.

Note that I'd say Logic Pro's popularity is actually particularly notable since it's not crossplatform, so the addressable market is far smaller than the other big players. It's phenomenal popular software, both in terms of raw popularity and fans who rave about it. E.g., note the contrast in how people talk about Pro Tools vs. Logic Pro. Logic Pro has some of the happiest users around, but Pro Tools customers talk like they feel like their hostages to the software. That difference is where the quality argument comes in.

What software do you find to be higher quality and why? That's the only valid way of even trying to have this conversation.

E.g., I'd rank something like VS Code "lower quality" because when I launch VS Code, I can see each layer of the UI pop in as it's created, e.g., first I see a blank window, then I see window chrome being loaded, then a I see a row of icons being loaded on the left. This gives an impression of the software not being solid, because it feels like the application is struggling just to display the UI.

> I also think you're confusing what I wrote. It's not a competition.

> I have just found that Apple's hardware on desktop has been stronger than their software, in my experience (periodic sporadic use, ~2006->now).

I disagree with this, the only way to make an argument that Apple has deficiencies in their software is to demonstrate that other software is higher quality than Apples. Otherwise it could just be Apple's quality level is the maximum feasible level of quality.

> unremarkable (notes, calendar, contacts!?) and awkward (pages, numbers, keynote).

This is laughable, Notes is unremarkable? Give me a break, and Keynote is awkward? Have you ever Google'd how people feel about these applications?

I'd argue a critic only has value if they're willing to offer their own taste for judgement.

> The web browser is often called "Web Browser" in the application launcher, LibreOffice Writer "Word Processor", and so on. In general there is far less branding and advertisement and more focus on function.

Should Emacs and Vim both be called "Editor" then?

To me, this is actually a great example of the problems with Linux as a community, that GUI applications seem to just be treated as placeholders (e.g., all word processors are the same?), but then its inconsistent by celebrating the unique differences between editors like Vim and Emacs. Photoshop, Excel, Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro are, in my opinion, crown jewels of what we've accomplished in computing, and by extension some of the greatest creations of the human race, democratizing tasks that in some cases would have cost millions of dollars before (e.g., a recording studio in your home). Relegating these to generic names like "spreadsheet", makes them sound interchangeable, when in my opinion they're each individual creations of great beauty that should wear their names with pride. They've helped improve the trajectory of the human race by facilitating many individuals to perform actions they never would have had the resources to do otherwise.

> I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger show-stopper in my opinion.

I don't find your original anecdote convincing:

> A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail).

E.g., what does this mean? They lost mail messages? How did they verify they had those messages before and after? E.g., file-system operations? GUI search? How much do they know about how Mail app stores message (e.g., I used to try understand this decades ago, but I expect today messages aren't even necessarily always stored locally)? How are you syncing mail messages, e.g., using native IMAP, or whatever Gmail uses, or Exchange? What's the email backend?

E.g. without deeper evidence this sounds more like a mail message indexing issue rather than a mail-messages-stored-on-disk-issue (in 2025, I'd personally have zero expectations about how Mail manages messages on disk, e.g., I'd expect local storage of message to be dynamically managed like most applications that aren't document-based use a combination of cloud functionality and local caching, e.g., found this in a quick search https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/471801/ensure-maco...), but if you have stronger evidence I'd love to hear it. But as presented your extrapolating much stronger conclusions than are warranted by the anecdote in my opinion.

> I don't think the automation options in MacOS are better than AutoHotKey (even Linux doesn't have something as good).

Did you try Keyboard Maestro https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ (I've never used AutoHotKey and I'd be super curious if there are deficiencies in KM relative to it, but Keyboard Maestro is, from my perspective, a masterpiece, it's hard to imagine it being any better.)

Also I think this statement needs a stronger defense given macOS includes Shortcuts, Automator, and AppleScript, I don't know much about Windows automation but I've never heard of them having something like AppleScript (that can say, migrate data between applications without using GUI scripting [e.g., iterate through open browser tabs and create todos from each of them operating directly on the application data rather than scripting the UI]).

I'd argue if you need to be told about keyboard shortcuts, then you're not a power user. (I.e., knowing how to find keyboard shortcuts I'd consider a core trait of power users).

> I don't agree with OP's sentiment that macOS is a bad dev environment, but surely I prefer Linux+KDE as an overall dev environment. I find that all the tools I need are there but that I'm fighting the UI/UX enough to make it a hassle relative to KDE.

This sounds like you think macOS is a good dev environment, but that you personally don't like the UI/UX (always safer to make UI/UX judgements subjective ["I don't like"] rather than objective ["it's bad"], since it's so difficult to evaluate objectively, e.g., compared to saying something like Docker doesn't run natively on macOS, which is just an objective fact).

Apple makes Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Notes, Calendar, Contacts, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Freeform, just from a "quality" standpoint, I'd rank any of those applications as competitive for the "highest quality" app in their category (an admittedly difficult thing to measure). In aggregate, those applications would make Apple the most effective company in the world at making high-quality GUI applications.

Curious if I'm missing something though, is there another entity with a stronger suite than that? Or some other angle to look at this? (E.g., it seems silly to me to use an MP3 metadata example when you're talking about the same company that makes Logic Pro.)

The parent isn't commenting about the speed of search, just that saying "No Results", when they really mean "we're still checking for results" is bad UI (which I agree with).

Just noting why I answered why don't do this (and honestly do think it's a very good idea) here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569313

Just noting that I answered why I don't use this approach here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569313

Yeah I do the same sometimes, at the risk of going too deep into personal preference. A couple of notes about that approach:

1. I don't recommend using shell functions or aliases for this (e.g., `bashrc`) because then these scripts can't be called from other contexts, e.g., like Vim and Emacs builtin support for shell commands. This can easily be solved by creating scripts that can be called from anywhere (my personal collection of these scripts is here https://github.com/robenkleene/Dotfiles/tree/master/scripts). Personally, I only use Bash functions for things that have to do with Bash's runtime state (e.g., augmenting PATH is a common one).

2. The more important part though, is I don't always want to search in `*.foo`, I want a flexible, well-designed, API that allows me to on-the-fly decide what to search.

#2 is particularly important and drifts in philosophy of tooling, a mistake I used to make is building my workflow today into customizations like scripts. This is a bad idea because then the scripts aren't useful as your tasks change, and hopefully your tasks are growing in complexity over time. I.e., don't choose your tools based on your workflow today, otherwise you're building in limitations. Use powerful tools that will support you no matter what task you're performing, that scale practically infinitely. "The measure of a bookshelf is not what has been read, but what remains to be read."

Thanks yeah this is a good example of why I prefer the simpler interface for `rg` and `fd`. Those examples would actually be fine if this were something only did once in awhile (or in a script). But I search from the command line many times per day when I'm working, so I prefer a more streamlined interface.

For the record, I think `git grep` is probably the best builtin solution to the problem I gave, but personally I don't know off-hand how to only search for files matching a glob and to use the current directory rather than the repository root with `git grep` (both of which are must haves for me). I'd also need to learn those same commands for different source control systems besides git (I use one other VCS regularly).

Curious if that answers the "I genuinely don't know what is going on here" then? Not searching hidden files (or third-party dependencies, which `rg` also does automatically with its ignore parsing) isn't just a nice to have, it's mandatory for a number of tasks a software engineer might be performing on a code base?

Out of curiosity, how would you recursively grep files ignoring (hidden files [e.g., `.git`]), only matching a certain file extension? (E.g., `rg -g '*.foo' bar`.)

I use the command line a lot too and this is one of my most common commands, and I don't know of an elegant way to do it with the builtin Unix tools.

(And I have basically the same question for finding files matching a regex or glob [ignoring the stuff I obviously don't want], e.g., `fd '.foo.*'`.)

I tried the test in Logic Pro, and Logic can split, join, reverse, all without creating any new files. It seems this varies per DAW.

> I don't know much about video but, video editing is simpler, you probably have a GPU to take a good chunk of the load off of the CPU and latency is less of an issue. How often do you do you have two dozen video tracks playing at once with each going through a dozen effects while trying to record a few more video tracks in real time all on your CPU?

I wouldn't characterize video in general this way (although NLEs maybe), e.g., a couple of dozen layers with effects in Adobe After Effects is common, and After Effects utilizes more CPU than GPU generally. After Effects can do all these operations without creating new files as well (although it has extremely aggressive caching both in RAM and on disk). (And real-time isn't as much a priority for video of course.)

I think this is partially an implementation detail, I think Ableton probably creates the extra files to help a bit with live performance since that's their focus. Whereas Logic Pro is a more generalist DAW. There are options to deliberately create new files, any time you want, in both (same with NLEs and After Effects).

What's the difference between a joined clip and the two separate clips sitting right next to each other in the timeline besides how they're presented in the UI?

Also I can do all of these options in an NLE like Adobe Premiere with video (i.e., I can split, join, reverse, etc... without creating any new media files), why wouldn't a DAW work the same way?

I did a quick test in Ableton Live, and I was able to copy, paste, split, and re-arrange without creating any new files. But joining clips and reversing clips did create new files (I was surprised joining did so in particular, it somewhat makes sense for reverse).

> Figma got where they are because their collaboration features are Google docs level.

I’d argue Figma got where they are mainly by streamlining the handoff process, not because of their live editing collaboration features per se. But there isn’t really an empirical way to validate this. But my point is really if you want to export natively to the web, just use, promote, etc... WebFlow that's the tool designed for that job.

> [Figma targets] design more broadly than simply website building.

This is absolutely true, but I’d argue it’s impossible to be able to both target many platforms, and simultaneously be able to export to all those platforms natively. I.e., you have to build the constraints of a specific platform into your tool in order to export to that format. This is what WebFlow is (and using it for just 5 minutes makes clear the trade-offs of designing a tool like that).

> DAW is designed for production, mixing, mastering, and when applied towards editing you can find yourself with a full hard drive in surprisingly little time because every edit means the DAW creates another audio file.

This isn't how the vast majority of operations work in the two DAWs I'm the most familiar with (Ableton Live and Logic Pro) work, most actions are non-destructive and don't result in extra files on your computer (e.g., the original file is referenced, and edits are applied on top of that without modifying the underlying audio file [a la Lightroom for photos]). There are certainly situations where new audio files are written, but it's usually crystal clear when you're doing so.

For the record, I agree with your overall point. DAWs abstract away a lot of the details of the underlying audio files, and there's definitely space for tools like Audacity that are designed to edit audio files staying closer to their export formats. So just clarifying that I wouldn't phrase the downside of DAWs (or at least not all DAWs) around creating a bunch of extra files (although I'd be curious to hear which DAWs actually do work that way [i.e., create new audio files based on edits], just for my own learning).

To address your point specifically though, Webflow is (at least from my perspective) the inevitable result of the line of thinking you're pursuing. So I'd be curious what you think of Figma vs. Webflow, and why those two products have their relative market positions.

I.e., "Tool A, used to design for technology B, doesn't output files in technology B format. [...] doesn't make much sense".

E.g., why not just use Webflow then? From my understanding, that's what it does, that's what it's made for.

Sure, but I was interpreting the parent comment as implying the underlying technology was important to the output format:

> people got in the trouble of making a web-app [...] and those designs are not plain web pages.

> It always bothered me that people got in the trouble of making a web-app, that generates designs, and those designs are not plain web pages.

Figma isn't a web app in the traditional sense of the word, it's a C++ app with a WebAssembly compile target. https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

E.g., it's more similar to how Adobe Illustrator and other C++ graphics programs render content than it is how a web browser engine renders HTML and CSS.

Adding to the sh implementation, `find -L "$HOME" -maxdepth 1 -type l -exec rm {} +` will clean up dead symlinks in your home directory, e.g., if a dotfile is deleted because it's not needed anymore.

macOS Tahoe adds true color support to Terminal.app https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/16/apples-terminal-app-mac...

For another approach, personally I found just doing `TERM=xterm-256color ssh <server>` more practical than the solutions at https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh