[sramsay]

This has more-or-less been my setup for over twenty-five years. I've used gentoo and vim that entire time, but have changed desktops a few times (i3 currently, but always something along those lines). All development -- and all writing -- is in terminals.

The difference is that I tend to to work on pretty high-powered machines (not for graphics or gaming, but for audio).

But the main reason I have this set up is that I find the minimalism . . . calming? It's not entirely distraction free, but I just find it easier to work in a kind of low-stimulation environment. I do occasionally work on way less powerful rigs (and way more powerful servers), and it's nice that the basic tools don't change. But ultimately, I think my fondness for this way of working might be aesthetic.

[imoreno]

The main reason for me is that terminal programs are just less crappy, because people who develop them try much harder. The terminal itself strikes me as a terrible platform - no text sizes, no fonts, no graphics... People dismiss it as unnecessary bells and whistles but then every other TUI program jumps through ridiculous hoops to reinvent crappy versions of these.

If only the same people developed their programs with the same philosophy (minimal, simple, clean UI and keyboard driven) but in a normal GUI, so that you don't have to abuse Unicode to draw UI and just draw it.

[mid-kid]

This has been my take on things forever. Power user tools tend to be made as a TUI, which is great in that it lets you work from the framebuffer and over SSH, but it really makes you wonder why we can't have the same conveniences with proper graphics.

[the_snooze]

I'm in the same boat. I want my computing tools to feel like a musical instrument: stable and predictable, very capable but requires skill and learning to use well, and serves me instead of drawing attention to itself. Let me get into a flow state and focus on the task at hand. Working in a terminal is that.

If UIs are constantly shifting or if there are popups telling you about a "cool" new feature, then that software feels less interested in serving the user and more serving its developers. I don't want the manic Silicon Valley hype-of-the-month when I have other more important things to do than fight with technology that's supposed to be helping me (and me exclusively).

[mystified5016]

A craftsman becomes a master largely by mastering his tools.

When your tools change every damn week because some faceless soulless middle manager wants a promotion, you can't master the damn tools.

I don't know how anyone is supposed to become a master at programming when the industry standard tooling requires waiting around for tooltips to show up because meaningless icons are "clean"