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by nameless912 3636 days ago
There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to make money for your work. The problem, honestly, is that a good terminal is a solved problem (c.f. urxvt, which is perfect in every way). Charging people for one would be like charging people for a vim clone. Why charge for an inferior product when someone's already created perfection? ;)

Second of all, learning shell scripting is an almost ridiculously important skill. Wouldn't it be better that you sit those devs down and have them go through a couple hours of intensive shell boot camp so they don't need your help anymore? Anyone who's a halfway-decent dev can learn the basics of shell (simple scripting, variables, redirection, piping) within a couple of hours, easy.

3 comments

To say the problem is solved you must first state it.

Maybe your terminal problem is solved (mine is), but their problem may be different.

Would you tell people who made chrome to quit back then, because the browser problem was solved? (IE, Opera, Mozilla Firefox) Or maybe tell Google to abandon drive and Microsoft onedrive and all that smaller companies like SugarSync to drop it because Dropbox has "solved it"?

This also means that indeed your previous question is good: it'd be nice if the author could explain the use case and business case for his terminal, seeing that we have a number of others around. (Google explained why Chrome with a comics thingy and got me immediately). But your questioning sounded like the author was already in err.

It's not that simple. The shell for you and me is muscle memory. For someone who takes a "boot camp" and then doesn't use what they've learned for 3 weeks, the boot camp was a waste of time.

Haven't you ever come back to a piece of code from a month ago and had to reacquaint yourself with it? (I know I can't be unique in that... ;) ) We cram an awful lot into our heads as devs, there's no room for things we barely use from a month ago.

To you, the shell may be perfect. For someone else, it's a severely antiquated method of input that was outdated after Windows 3.1.

I love me some shell, but that's you and me. Not all devs.

Edit: reminds me of CPR class. After a month or so, you better brush up lest you actually need to use it!

Here's what you do: in the middle of the night, sneak into all of your devs' offices and fuck with their xorg.conf's. Make them drop to command line only for a couple weeks (because we all know it takes at least that long to diagnose an xorg.conf....) and they'll learn. Oh they'll learn ;)
That's like saying you drop a modern human in the middle of the jungle, and tell em to survive for a week. I'm sure they'll "learn", or die trying but is that really a good way to do it?!
Or they'll quit. Oh they'll quit ;)
or, they'll just reinstall the OS, if they have decent backups.
you're a terrible person
I also kick puppies and write one word commit messages.
But I like them.
While I agree with you that urxvt is a great tool, I disagree with the suggestion that the terminal is "a solved problem" (or that vim is perfection). There is a lot of room for innovation, though not necessarily in the direction that Go Terminal is going.