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by mega_dean 594 days ago
I've noticed that I get very distracted by motion in my peripheral vision, but not by static images. So I can use a second monitor for things like documentation, but not something like Slack that shows new messages, animated gifs/emojis, etc.

I've also configured my text editor to be very "static": when I type, the only things that can happen are the cursor moves, or text is inserted. I have to manually trigger things like the autocompletion popup, LSP checks, or highlighting the symbol under the cursor.
2 comments
botanical76 593 days ago
This reminds me of some of the early linting tools that emerged around the time ES5 / node.js was blowing up. I found the defaults to be insanely distracting, giving me warnings about unused variables etc as I was still typing the code (of course it's unused, I just defined it!)

GitHub Copilot is similar, defaulting to provide suggestions to finish your LOC whenever you stop typing. While the AI tools can be very useful, the benefit is lost if I can't focus on what I'm writing.

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alpaca128 593 days ago
That's one of the reasons I use Vim. It does absolutely nothing without an input and has nothing unnecessary on the screen. Unfortunately pretty much all modern editors and IDEs aim for the exact opposite, the last time I tried VS Code it even had a button floating above the code for some git related stuff.

So far I haven't seen a piece of software that tries to do everything under the sun while also being enjoyable to use.

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