R.L. Dane 
🍵 
Paul Wilde 
@rl_dane but that's what autossh is for!
Do one thing and do it well - Unix 👍
Do all the things! - KDE and Gnome and systemd too probably. 👎
thedoctor
sotolf@thedoctor @paul @rl_dane Well, I don't know if it is my personal deficiencies, but I find it easier to do it in text, it's clearer, easier to find, and I can do troubleshooting easier because I can see the logs when something didn't go the way I wanted them to.
This is why I wish Jef Raskin had won at Apple, instead of Steve Jobs.
Steve gave us a user-friendly computer with limited utility.
Jef would've given us a slightly less user-friendly paradigm (text-based OS) that would have been much more empowering.
An entire generation raised on Jef's ideas would have been far more competent at using computers than the generation raised on the GUI.
@rl_dane @thedoctor @paul yeah I never grew up in the ui world, starting out with dos computers, uis is something that belong in programs and games to me, the os doesn't really need it, but of course that's my bias as someone that just works there.
I actually wish CLI/TUI Unix programs would learn some lessons from the DOS programs of yore.
I find stuff like Lotus 1-2-3 way more intuitive than (neo)?vim.
Something that the DOS world successfully borrowed from the Macintosh world is a semi-standardized set of keybinds and interaction paradigms.
In the Unix world, you have vi-style, emacs-ish-style, and nearly every program requires memorizing custom keystrokes, unless the program itself is very customizable.
cc: @mirabilos
mirabilos@rl_dane @paul @sotolf @thedoctor yes!
(Which is why I stick to Wordstar keybindings for the editor and "Emacs" for the shell, and stick with pine/alpine as MUA having learnt its bindings in the late 1990s (but I refuse to even consider pico))
@mirabilos @rl_dane @paul @thedoctor Yeah, for some reason being a vim user for over 15 years I still prefer emacs for the shell, I'm used to it, and it's the standard, I try to be as comfortable with vanilla tools as possible since I have to work on different servers all the time, and can't or won't bother with importing all my dotfiles everywhere and install tools that I'd rather use.
@sotolf @mirabilos @paul @thedoctor
Using HP-UX 20+ years ago forced me to love set -o vi, as emacs mode wasn't an option in that old version of ksh. ;)
I still use vi mode to this day. I barely know the emacs mode keybinds. XD
Also, that old ksh required you to use a double-escape-key-press to trigger completion, rather than tab. That was really annoying. XD
@mirabilos @sotolf @paul @thedoctor
Even if I had known of it at the time, I wouldn't have tried to install it on 100 servers. XD
Although, I must terrifyingly admit that I later developed a script that could touch all servers and run commands on them simultaneously... and I was an infosec guy.
Plumbers have the worst pipes. XD
@sotolf @thedoctor @rl_dane @paul I was never fond of scripting that, but I do find using clusterssh to do that interactively on a dozen or so servers at a time delightful. Allows you to react, or even just account for differences.
That’s why I also dislike ANSI-Bell that much.
@mirabilos @sotolf @thedoctor @paul
In this case, it was an abomination using ksh, expect, and a certain vendor's security product for privilege escalation. XD
@mirabilos @paul @sotolf @thedoctor
pico was my first unix editor. It took me 8 more years to finally learn vi properly, although I was only using Unix regularly for maybe two of those years.
Thank goodness for easily accessible Unix OSes these days! :D
(I mean, Linux, and a little later FreeBSD were available for all of those years, but not as well known, and hardware itself wasn't nearly as accessible as it is today (nor the OSes as capable to run on off-the-shelf hardware))
@rl_dane @thedoctor @paul @mirabilos
To be fair I don't think vim's goal is to be intuitive, it's more to be good to work with over a long period :) Sure the word perfect that I had on my old PC with a overlay that you glued onto the top of the keyboard with all the shortcuts in different shift levels and so on, user friendly, but en effect not as comfortable when you've worked with it for years, it's always kind of a deal you have to make either something that is easy in the short term, or comfortable in the long term :)
@sotolf @thedoctor @paul @mirabilos
I think #kakoune tries to bridge the gap between user-friendly and "power-user-friendly" (to attempt to sum up what you were saying into a single term).
Unfortunately, it broke some muscle memory for me, and was therefore a non-starter.
Not hating on the project, I think it's brilliant. I just personally can't use a vi-like editor that isn't a pretty strict superset of vi keybinds.
@rl_dane @thedoctor @paul @mirabilos Yeah, I really wanted to like kakoune and helix, I just can't use it, it's just different enough to confuse me, while similar enough that my vim muscle memory kicks in every time :p
@thedoctor @rl_dane no, because it makes assumptions that a UI is something people want to use.
I prefer the "autossh exists, so let's use that but build a UI in our DE that can manage it" solution, rather than building their own thing
Yeah, the (what do you call it, "Not Made Here?" "Not Implemented Here?") phenomenon is a real thing with big DE projects.