59
Condor
6y

GUI user: "How can you work from such a basic text interface like that terminal?"
Me: "How can you work with all those stupid buttons that more often than not can't do jack shit?"

Being a Powerline user, I do think that design matters a lot. But so does usability (I don't want my programs to take half a minute to load their bloated UI's) and the ability to use every feature that this or that piece of software has in its command line arguments but not necessarily as a GUI option.

Comments
  • 10
    @RantSomeWhere Long live devRant compression, I can't see the whitespace at all :P
    Here I'm using Monofur for Powerline.. I think it's rendered best at 16px. On Termux I'm using a different one though.. looks to be Source Code Pro. The problem in it is that those ╭╰ chars don't render very well in Monofur for Termux. Still better than WSL though.. there they don't render at all :v
  • 8
    @RantSomeWhere Probably it's font-related.. consider switching the font around a bit to see if there's a different one that you like and doesn't have this design issue in its glyphs (come to think of it, that could be a wk113 of its own! XD). I've found Powerline to often really be like Arabic.. everything has to match just right with the other glyphs to not cause major OCD triggering :')
  • 7
    @RantSomeWhere Awesome!! That actually looks really good. Any place where I can see its dotfiles? Things such as storage status would be very interesting things to include in my own dotfiles as well.

    Also just because I've had issues with this earlier, could you try typing a long command (like 'ls /some/very/long/path/to/some/random/file/somewhere/in/the/filesystem) and tab whenever you reach right underneath the right prompt (preferably when there's multiple completions available)? In my case that always results in the characters jumping around, but it proved extremely difficult to pinpoint where exactly this issue is. Could be zsh, glibc, Powerline, powerlevel9k, zsh-completions, anything really.. hence why I'm asking.. so far my attempts at isolating these cases have all failed.
  • 1
    I have command line windows and GUI windows open, depends on what I'm working on. Sometimes, a GUI is better for usability, but sometimes, it's the CLI. Combine the best of both worlds.
  • 7
    @RantSomeWhere Also using Powerlevel9k I see :3 great stuff! I'll have to see how exactly this oh-my-zsh setup can be ported to my own dotfiles.. but so far it looks great! Thanks!
  • 8
    @filthyranter same here.. GUI is easier for sure.. but it really depends on the scenario. More often than not I have a few console windows open, but that's mostly to maintain my own skills or to interact with stuff in a manner that gives me a more console-friendly feedback (possible stderr, extended output, scriptability etc) but GUI's are easier to interact with from somewhere where there isn't a keyboard available, such as phones and tablets. I do highly value my skills as a terminal user though. Recently it allowed me to boot my broken Arch system into a rescue shell, manually mount /dev, /sys, and /proc and chroot in. From there I could approach the "true console" as if it was a regular terminal.. Powerline, colors, everything. Only the font was unpatched. I ended up exiting when I found out that my wireless interface didn't get initialized (probably an issue with systemd which got broken during the previous failed update) and I couldn't access the internet to reinstall packages from the internet and patch the system from the chroot. Now it's inserted into my server again, awaiting further maintenance. But being able to control an initramfs' rescue shell like that, I value that skill a lot :)
  • 2
    Yeah, and cli can be sexy af! For all those oh my zsh users: what theme do you use?

    Personally, I use af-magic: simple, slick and not intrusive
  • 2
    Tmux + Powerline makes the shell many times more useful than GUIs in my opinion.
    I can quickly get things done without clicking 200 buttons.
  • 3
    @RantSomeWhere hmm, I see.. may be some bug in my particular setup then. Thanks for helping to pinpoint the issue :) I'll investigate further in my system then.
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