Comment by ninetyninenine

1 day ago

Ok. No snark. Sessions, tabs, windows, tiling . All done in GUIs and done better.

Tmux is good when you have no gui.

But all this endless getting square pegs to fit in a round hole is what causes the snarks. Like you want to draw windows? Let’s use terminal characters instead of lines! Makes perfect sense.

I find it incredulous that a lecture had to get this guy to realize what’s wrong with tmux and he still doesn’t see that this problem can be avoided by using a gui. He still goes for terminal abstractions.

GUI is an obvious solution. But this guy is blind.

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ninetyninenine

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em-bee  1 day ago

No snark

thank you. that helps.

All done in GUIs and done better

could be done, and i agree. but i have yet to find a terminal GUI that actually does.

tmux has a great and useful TUI. all the terminals i have tried so far, have a very minimal GUI. they have tabs, and some have panes that's about it. tmux works out of the box without any configuration at all. i can just build up my sessions interactively. i evaluated kitty a year ago, and i am testing wezterm now. neither are usable without having to manually write an elaborate config file, and neither include all the features that tmux has.

i would love to find a GUI terminal to replace tmux. but there isn't one yet. at least it looks like both wezterm and kitty are working on it. so maybe in a year or two there will be something that can actually compete with tmux. but until then it's just a wish.

  • ninetyninenine  1 day ago

    Get rid of terminal all together. That's the angle I'm coming from. Problem solved.

    • em-bee  1 day ago

      well that's even worse, i mean in terms of what GUIs so far have achieved. a GUI that is capable of replacing the commandline has not been built yet.

devnullbrain  1 day ago

> Sessions, tabs, windows, tiling . All done in GUIs and done better.

Sorry but no, really no.

Windows:

- Has two ways of swapping between windows, taking up 2/3 of my modifier keys for use with Tab

- Loves to offset windows by one pixel and resize my taskbar

- Irrevocably moves things around if I disconnect a monitor

- Flashes taskbar icons constantly, like a particularly badly behaved terminal bell

and Mac:

- Leaves zombie processes in the cmd-tab list

- Is philosophically incompatible with any kind of fullscreen workflow.

Both have:

- Slow animations for basic windowing

- Only a few tiling options

- Minimal configurability...

- ...which doesn't matter anyway, because if someone at HQ gets bored, you're getting a UI interface redesign that's incompatible with your current workflow

- An approach to tab dragging that induces seizuring windows, because things are just too slow and fickle

- The ability for anything to steal my focus, mid-typing

But what's most damning of all is that both have a wealth of popular tools written and used by people trying to wrangle them into something useable.

There is nothing I could do to make them as fast to use as my tmux based workflow, simply because they do not work quickly enough for the keypresses I'm entering and don't even appear to be deterministic.

  • ninetyninenine  1 day ago

    Use different apps. Don't have to stick with the default OS window primitives. omfg. I use loop for macos.

    So for some reason a terminal app where you can't even draw a proper line vertically across the screen... somehow the people who make apps for terminal are geniuses in making windowing UIs, more genius then people who want to work in pixels. I don't understand why.

    And these complete geniuses are like, NO! I don't want to work with pixels. I want to use ascii characters to draw stuff that ONLY looks sort of like boxes, because that's the smarter thing to do!

    And don't get me started on config files. What's better, a menu where I'm presented with all my options? Or a freaking config file where none of the options are presented and I have to look it up in a man page and then if I make a typo often it doesn't tell me there's a problem.

    And likely you aren't even using that terminal app in a proper terminal. You're emulating a terminal underneath a GUI which is a huge performance penalty. Modern OS's present to you an advanced interface, but you're too elite to use it, so you EMULATE a primitive interface underneath the advanced interface.

    Bro use linux and uninstall gnome or KDE. Throw that mouse into the trash. That's the common sense future of UI according to you?

    • em-bee  1 day ago

      a freaking config file where none of the options are presented and I have to look it up in a man page

      oh the irony. because that is what wezterm and kitty make me go through. i'll have a report soon.

      EDIT: here is the report: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762241

      that wezterm config file is a monster. all that, just to have tmux like functionality. well, at least it is possible. that's a massive step forward.