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Comment by james_marks

5 days ago

Reminds of the DOS order management software I used in the 90’s.

ASCII tables, text only, with F key shortcuts. Hard to learn but blazing fast once you did.

Nothing modern approaches it.

5 comments

james_marks

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mvdwoord  5 days ago

As a support engineer at IBM we used a mainframe system called NRCPMA iirc... I think NR stood for Northern Region. Accessed via a terminal emulator, fully customizable with macros, fastest tool I ever worked with indeed, once you climbed the initial learning curve.

deepsun  5 days ago

Reminds me of modern IDEs -- developers, both old and new, are too lazy to learn a complex IDE to speed up their work, even though it's their main tool for making money.

  • datpuz  5 days ago

    I don't think efficiency of navigating your IDE is a major factor in your productivity. If you like your setup, it's probably not going to matter a whole lot. The tool you make money with is your brain.

    • deepsun  5 days ago

      Hard disagree.

      Few points I can easily remember:

      1. Navigating the code, e.g easily see all the callers, navigate up/down the call tree requires static code analysis. Super handy while reading someone's else code, which is like 90% on large projects.

      2. Quick refactorings. Often times I see people discuss in lengths what would/could be instead of just go and try it out quickly, seeing all the pros and cons. Many times I proven myself wrong by trying it out and seeing pitfalls I didn't see earlier.

      3. Warnings: so many real bugs could've been prevented if developers had seen (or cared about) to IDE showing a warning. Many PR review suggestions are detectable by a proper IDE without wasting reviewer's time.

      4. Hotkeys (what the parent comment was talking about) -- speeds up all of that, especially refactorings, freeing dev's brain for thinking of architecture and other problems.

      I can go on an on. Sometimes it feels like 50%+ of AI usage for coding is to free up fingers, not knowing that they were already mostly free by using static analysis features/hotkeys.

    • geoka9  5 days ago

      It pays to help one's brain stay in the flow, though, and fast and reliable muscle-memory-based navigation of one's IDE does exactly that.