My laptop has a fn lock that you can toggle, it can be very convenient to switch to f-key mode when working with some applications but most of the time I’m using volume or brightness keys.

Rust can use all basic C data types, but it can’t use C++ classes, in any straightforward way at least.

I’d say that stuff like this happens less often on windows, but it’s also worse when it does because you have fewer resources to fix problems when you do run into them

I’m sure there are ways to make it more convenient to use a terminal with dyslexia but I’m gonna guess that it’s always going to be a bit of an uphill battle. It might make more sense to use a gui in that case for many applications. Conversly, it’s also good to make sure you have a proper terminal interface as well for disability reasons, but also for the convenience that a terminal interface can provide for people who are familiar with the terminal.

Fair enough, I’m not against people making guis as well for people who prefer them for whatever reason, my point is that people don’t just prefer terminals because of elitism or something. I imagine terminals can be better than guis for some disabilities as well.

As a terminal fan, my main reasons for preferring them over a gui (for some tasks) are:

1. It’s faster to type than to navigate menus
2. If I don’t know where something is and can’t guess it instantly, it’s usually faster to search for it in a man page than randomly digging through gui menus
3. You can combine commands with each other with pipes or $()
4. You can search through your command history to find previous commands
5. You can write scripts and aliases to automate common tasks
6. The terminal requires less context switching. Typing ten commands is less mentally taxing than opening ten different guis

The barrier for entry is higher with terminals but unless you need visual feedback (e.g. because you’re editing an image) it’s easier and faster for both common and rare tasks.

I am not going to install linux due to my program requirements for work not having official support

Fair!

That’s fine but it’s weird to expect widespread use when convenience is considered a waste

I don’t think it’s just about saving dev time (though that is also a big part of it) but also that many people, such as myself as well as most people who make open source programs, genuinely think that the terminal is more convenient than a gui. This is a niche position though and as you say an obstacle to mainstream use.

I do wonder how far away we are from a linux for casual use that you can use without the terminal, since there are already a couple of gui tools for common tasks. In my mind, the average casual user mostly uses maybe their browser, spotify, office products, steam (which may require installing a different graphic card driver, which isn’t very user friendly), some messaging platform and photoshop or something. Honestly this shouldn’t be that hard to do with just gui tools, modulo the graphic card drivers. Comparability with various programs is a problem though, you might have to settle for libre office and gimp instead of ms office and photoshop for example.

I work with programming so my experience of linux is obviously a bit different than an artist trying out linux for the first time. What are things you remember having to use the command line for? Installing packages is the most obvious one but there are graphical front ends for many package manager. Editing config files maybe? I wonder if part of the problem is that most tutorials when you google explain how to do things on the command line rather than how to do it through a gui.

While this isn’t the only reason, I think part of it is that linux, windows and osx are good at different things. If you move from windows and try to install your favorite windows programs, you’re probably going to have an experience that’s worse than the windows one. If you move from linux to windows the experience is much worse in that regard. To really see the value of linux you have to get used to having e.g. a tiling window manager or a package manager (tbf, chocolatey on windows is ok). But when you’re just getting into it, linux just feels weird and convoluted in comparison.

IIRC, it started of as a joke and an explicit nazi reference to make fun of PC gaming fanboys, and then they just embraced it without understanding the context?

only good thing about javascript is that it forces people to put the squiggly brackets on the right

There are many cases I actually prefer the quickfix list to an interactive picker:

• When working on a very large project, such as my $DAYJOB, interactiveness gets in the way more than it helps if you’re running a slow command (like greping a large number of files)
• You can use :Cfilter to filter things matched in the quickfix list and :colder/:cnewer to navigate the history of the quickfix list without having to rerun the command
• You can run ex commands on the items in the quickfix list, like :cdo norm gcc to comment the matched lines (with the vim-commentary plugin), run a macro with :cdo norm @q, or :cdo yank A to put all the matched lines in the a register for example. You can also do stuff like :cdo -10,+10g/re/p to print all lines matching some regular expression re within the range of 10 lines before to 10 lines after the match.
• You can put more things in the quickfix list than you can with interactive pickers, like :Git diftool to get diffs. Vim also has support for parsing the output of many compilers and linting tools so you can use e.g. :compiler cargo followed by :make to build the current project with cargo and get any build errors in the quickfix list.

In short, interactive pickers are better for browsing, but the quickfix list is better for scipting and holding on to data for longer without having to rerun commands, and can with some basic scripting be used for more things.

Afaik helix doesn’t have diff capabilities which is also a major thing missing from my git workflow.

I expect some of these things to make it into helix eventually, particularly git stuff, but I would be surprised if they add support for more weird janky vim stuff like the quickfix list and ex commands, which is a valid design decision, but they are also very useful tools once you get your head around them.

I sometimes play around with Helix and I almost always have a good time, but there are too many vim features that I have integrated in my workflow that there isn’t any good equivalent to in Helix. I use ex commands, the quickfix list, snippets, the fugitive plugin and just little custom commands and mappings that I’ve accumulated. I don’t see myself switching to any editor full time that doesn’t have a replacement for most of these features, but Helix is very nice and fun to use occasionally.