Comment by mezyt
2 days ago
Plus, how many shell can one individual open in a day ? I'm doing that once per day on a good day, maybe twenty if I have a lot of unplanned work on subprojects that needs to be done concurrently with my main task.
2 days ago
Plus, how many shell can one individual open in a day ? I'm doing that once per day on a good day, maybe twenty if I have a lot of unplanned work on subprojects that needs to be done concurrently with my main task.
Sometimes hundreds per day. Tabs come and go here. People have different workflows.
Yesterday just shy over 50, according to entries from `login` in the system log.
I do launch multiple interpreters just to get a fancy coloful cowsay on each launch. Which involves the fortune program, lolcat (via ruby) and cowsay itself (via Perl). I probably should optimise that into a single C binary for better startup times! :)
The problem with long startups is that they break the flow. I live in CLI. I open and close terminal windows all day long, sometimes just for quick 2-3 commands to check something. 100 new interactive shells a day is my guess. I already know commands to run, my fingers are ready to type, they already pressed the keys ti spawn a new shell and now they have to stop for 500 ms. Repeat these 100 interruptions every day and you get the death by 1000 spoons.
I don't use oh my zsh, but on one laptop zsh took 600ms to start. I narrowed it down to a strange "bug": adding even a single empty file to the custom fpath caused the slowdown. It bugged me so bad that I decided to try fish again, but this time for real. And this time it stuck with me. I like its architecture (defining functions to change its look-and-feel - great idea!) and of course its 32 ms startup time.
As another commenter, I'm probably at 100s per day.
A reason is that I use i3 workspaces, with each workspace being for different tasks, so I don't want to reuse a terminal that has another context.
One issue with keeping a single shell is that the history is full of irrelevant stuff. If you run commands that take a while and print a lot of output, you want it to be as clean as possible. If I want the beginning of the command, I can scroll to the top, and I don't end up with some unrelated output.
I also take quite notes in vim everywhere, often next to long-running commands, using tmux.