Comment by MeetingsBrowser
9 hours ago
Having used both terminal and GUI based development environments, the good GUI environments blow terminal based workflows out of the water.
There are pros and cons to each. Vim can do some neat things, but GUI based IDEs are generally useful and easier to use out of the box for development.
The terminal tools are getting popular because people don’t need to do development. Claude is doing the development task. People just need to quickly review code in terminal.
> but GUI based IDEs are generally useful and easier to use out of the box for development.
This is true, they are much better for discovery and affordance, but as you progress with your tooling and tool usage there is a much higher ceiling on your productivity with other tools and their composability. In my opinion, not putting effort into learning tools ultimately holds a lot of people back from their potential.
I use both and mostly agree, but for me I don’t think the ROI for learning terminal based tooling is there.
They make some parts of text manipulation faster, but those parts of text manipulation take up less than 1% of my time spent working.
Things like debugging, which take up a large portion of my time, are not so nice in terminal based environments
Yes, for things like Node, I do use tools like the chrome dev tools for debugging and such.
But find a terminal first approach leads me to other tools like curl and jq usage as I go. I see coworkers using a ton of time trying to repetitively execute the code to see those spots in really inefficient ways. And end up completely lost when they could be using tools like git bisect.
Or another good example devops type support is if one web server out of many seems to be misbehaving, I can use aws command line to get internal ips behind the lb to curl to grep and find it in minutes after others have tried for hours. It makes it second nature if your mind goes there first.
I work 99% in a terminal and fire up a JetBrains IDE when I need to do deep debugging. It’s so rare for me though that it’s worth more for me to get good at the terminal stuff. I’m sure this depends heavily on the type of work being done, game dev for example really needs a good debugger. That being said, gdb and others have perfectly fine text mode interfaces, albeit with a steeper learning curve.
As always, the “best” tool is the one your most familiar with that gets the job done. Text vs GUI doesn’t really matter at the middle of the bell curve.
Why would you say GUI based workflows are better (ignoring LLMs for now)? I would maybe give you debugging with breakpoints but for anything else I love my neovim with tmux setup
I spend more time reading and debugging code than writing it.
Vim and other terminal tools make doing complex text manipulation easy, but I rarely need to do anything complex when writing code.
I also work from different machines and ephemeral vms regularly and don’t want to spend time setting things up each time.
I can install vscode and the one lsp plugin I need in under a minute. In contrast, Vim doesn’t even have line number enabled by default.
I don't think setup time is a fair comparison here. Any dev who cares to use CLI tools has a dotfiles repo that sets up everything in "under a minute".
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I find that (neo)vim enable code navigation to be much faster than any GUI as well, once past the learning curve. If you’re going to work with code long term (eg: years), the learning curve pays off quickly.
Lol terminal is better for everything except maybe the one case you mentioned: first time use feature discovery, and that's debatable
That seems a little harsh. GUI tools can give us a more vibrant and useful interface.
But, I think the main problem is that although there have been many attempts we have not gotten to a standard way to compose different GUI tools easily or repeat actions.
I spend half or more of my time debugging and I think I would quit if I were forced to only use terminal based tools.
I completely disagree. Terminal workflows are superior in a number of ways. Most important to me are that they are more composable and more customizable. The learning curve is tougher, but the "skill ceiling" on them is higher. The ease and speed with which somebody comfortable in their terminal based environment will navigate through the tasks they need to do will always exceed what is even possible in a GUI.
I would say that GUIs are superior for a few specific use cases, but otherwise sub par. Step through debugging comes to mind as a good GUI use case, but even that I'm not sure if it's because a GUI is inherently better, or making a terminal based debugger is harder and so nobody has made a good one yet.
> Terminal workflows are superior in a number of ways
What specific ways do you find boost your productivity the most?
For me, the things terminal workflows can do faster take up almost a negligible amount of my workday.
Curious to hear if I’m missing out on a terminal workflow, or if my workday is just very different from yours
Composability sounds great until you need to onboard three new devs who would rather gouge their eyes out than decipher an 80-line shell script that breaks on macOS because one env var or BSD tool behaves differently. That cost is not theory.
Terminal skill ceiling exists, but a lot of custom flows are just local maxima that look elegant to the person who wrote them and miserable to everyone else who has to debug or extend them. GUIs give up some raw power, yet for diff review, history browsing, and getting a team moving without turning every workflow into a tiny priesthood, they are often the better tool.