Top all-time · #1432
Tom Ryder
Personal blog · sanctum.geek.nz/arabesquesystemsprogramming
Tom Ryder writes Arabesque, a personal blog at sanctum.geek.nz about systems and programming. Since 2016, 49 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “Unix as IDE”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link the Arabesque blog for its Unix-as-IDE series, the 'Actually using ed' tutorial, and the Vim koans and anti-patterns posts on working in the terminal and text editors.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Praised as a great explanation of using ed, an excellent and favourite Unix-as-IDE series, and a gem of a unidex post.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Systems administrator, software developer, and technical writer, living in New Zealand.
Most-linked posts?
- Unix as IDE11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2016-10-06
- Actually using ed (2012)10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2016-09-11
- Vim Koans6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-08-02
- Vim Anti-Patterns5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-10-05
- Why Not GitHub? (2017)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-04-29
- /etc/emperor-sh-and-the-traveller.txt2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-16
- Unix as IDE2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-10-24
What Hacker News says?
After reading lots of similar anecdotes about Ed (Steven Levy's "Hackers" dedicates quite a few words to it), I was quite sure it was pretty much unusable for today's UI patterns, but also morbidly curious about how it might eventually work. Then I came across "Actually using ed"[1], which did such a great job at explaining how to use the tool that I decided to throw in my 2 cents by submitting an entry to the tldr-…
Comment linking /arabesque/actually-using-ed/
on “Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim”Submitted Vim Anti-Patterns as a story · 458 points
HN discussionMy answer is in this excellent series I read a while ago: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/ Which, admittedly, is essentially the same as the other answers you got, but that's how I've been working for three years, since I decided to use vim exclusively. At the start, I was really tempted to install plugins, but ultimately I decided not to. Both to practice with the terminal (which has been immea…
Comment linking /arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/
on “The Era of Visual Studio Code”Submitted Vim Anti-Patterns (2012) as a story · 385 points
HN discussionExactly. The only thing needed to configure when starting out is disabling of arrow keys and low keyboard repeat rate so that you don't do wrong things like holding down keys (arrow keys, delete, backspace etc.). Holding down keys is a Vim anti-pattern. [1]: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-anti-patterns/
Comment linking /arabesque/vim-anti-patterns/
on “Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor”Submitted Better Bash History (2012) as a story · 267 points
HN discussionI will try to answer your questions as I have seen both sides of the fence. I initially used Visual Studio (around 2012) and really loved the power it gave me. I never felt slow or inefficient until I saw a screencast about Apache config that used vim and I was amazed to see how the person could simply jump to places he wanted. So I set out to try vim. I switched it for all my hobby work but it didn't catch on. So I…
Comment linking /arabesque/vim-anti-patterns/
on “Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor”Submitted Unix as IDE as a story · 237 points
HN discussion> One that I think is more common among intermediate, and even advanced, users is the misuse of tabs, windows, and buffers. The author addresses that, too, in https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-misconceptions : > The model Vim uses for [tabs and windows]( https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/buffers-windows-tabs ) is rather different from most GUI editors, but both are supported and have been for some time.
Comment linking /arabesque/buffers-windows-tabs
on “Vim Anti-Patterns”- nz · 2018-06-20
Submitted Using Unix as an IDE (2012) as a story · 162 points
HN discussion I'll argue that the IDE is Unix, not vim, I recently started and endeavour to vanilla Vim and I was baffled by what is possible even without plugins, granted I mostly work with C and a bit of Python, but one thing to consider is that most people using Vim come from an IDE background, so horse for course I guess. https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/ Edit: Link
Comment linking /arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/
on “How Did Vim Become So Popular?”Submitted Unix as IDE (2012) as a story · 142 points
HN discussionFor learning to get things done with Unix, I recommend the two old books "Unix Programming Environment" and "The AWK Programming Language". There are many resources to learn the various commands etc., but there is still no better place than those books to learn the "unix philosophy". This series is also good: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/
Comment linking /arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/
on “Problem solving with Unix commands”Submitted Actually using ed (2012) as a story · 114 points
HN discussionThis might be of interest! "Actually using ed": https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/actually-using-ed/
Comment linking /arabesque/actually-using-ed/
on “Vim for Humans”Submitted Cron best practices as a story · 97 points
HN discussionVim Koans: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-koans/
Comment linking /arabesque/vim-koans/
on “Rust Koans (2015)”Submitted Vim Koans as a story · 77 points
HN discussionGreat remark at the end: "they had one great disadvantage: none of them were Ken Thompson" Aside from retrocomputing is there any actual use for ed in this day and age though? https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/actually-using-ed/
Comment linking /arabesque/actually-using-ed/
on “Where grep came from [video]”Submitted Vim Misconceptions as a story · 77 points
HN discussionWell, there are ways to use such commands on windows too, like WSL, git-bash, cygwin, etc. And, there's powershell on windows (though I haven't used it and not sure about its capabilities) As to why use shell, that depends on your use case and working environment. Shell is something like an IDE [0] where you can solve multiple tasks from single environment. You don't have to use multiple programs (window manager, te…
Comment linking /arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/
on “Text Processing in the Shell”Submitted Linux Crypto as a story · 12 points
HN discussionMight I be mistaken that the VIM Koans were the original? https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-koans/ The fine article also mentions the VIM Koans.
Comment linking /arabesque/vim-koans/
on “Git Koans (2013)”Submitted Unix as IDE (2012) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSee also Vim koans https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-koans/
Comment linking /arabesque/vim-koans/
on “Git Koans (2013)”Submitted Vim Anti-Patterns as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis (advanced?) vi/m tutorial I really liked and found it useful over the years https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/vi/009-in... . It is by Walter Alan Zintz, originally published in UnixWorld Online, dvelves into more advanced vi/m use. From https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/unidex/ , that itself I find a gem (e.g https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/ ). Long time lurker first time p…
Comment linking /arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/
on “Editors (Vim)”Submitted Why Not GitHub? (2017) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGetting out of telnet? Mere bagatelle compared to trying to get out of `ed` for the first time. At least Telnet attempts to tell you what to do. The defacto ed tutorial exactly predicts/describes my first encounter: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/actually-using-ed/
Comment linking /arabesque/actually-using-ed/
on “The text adventure game of exiting a Telnet session”Submitted Using Unix as an IDE as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
