It is very good even though it's in early development. Issues are getting fixed almost as fast as I can find them. I have to use macOS sometimes for work and OmniWM made it bearable.
As someone who never uses spaces or any window manager, what am I actually missing? What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps?
Is this going to be some
Kind of major epiphany?!
Spaces is what used to known in Linux as virtual desktops (maybe it still is), and that is how I think of it. Or as virtual monitors. Right now I have desktop one for local system iTerm2 and Firefox, desktop two for client 1 (terminals, IntelliJ IDEA), desktop three for client 2 (VirtualBox, terminals), desktop four for incidental stuff that needs a mostly empty desktop, and desktop five for Chrome (for things that need it), and GIMP and Inkscape (as needed). This way everything stays where I put it, including which windows over which other ones. So I can switch to D1 to look up some documentation on a function, then back to D2 to use that knowledge. Or on my personal laptop I can keep my coding project up one desktop and do the daily web surfing on another, and just switch desktops to have the coding project right where I left it.
(You do use a window manager, btw, it's the thing that puts the title bars on your windows and lets you move them around. On macOS it's integrated in, but on Linux you have to choose one. There are many, all of which have some failing. Except for sawfish, whose failing is that it is no longer maintained.)
> What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps?
Open 3 terminal windows. Try to switch back & forth between just two of them with a keyboard shortcut (without mentally tracking whether or not to press Shift). You can't.
Open a browser and two terminal windows. Try to switch between one terminal (your editor) and the browser window (your reference docs), without also bringing the other terminal above the browser window, covering up your docs. You can't.
> Is this going to be some Kind of major epiphany?!
If you don't use several windows per app, probably not. But, I do, and macOS's window manager is awful for it.
I am disappointed at the amount of negativity here. HN generally loves an experimental domain-specific language, no matter how janky. To be clear, I don't know if this is janky, but the knee-jerk anti-AI sentiment is not intellectually stimulating.
I'm not a coder, I'm a medical doctor. I see some interesting parallels in how medical students sort themselves into specialties by cognitive style to this new rift in programming with LLMs.
Some people like the deep work, some like managing a steady rain of chaos. There's no one right answer. But I'll tell you that my classmates who are happy as nephrologists are very different to the ones that are happy as transplant surgeons.
I tried it out a bit. Like SQLite, it can be used as an embedded db in a flat file. It will be interesting to see what Apple does with it. Their blog had some great examples using BAML.
Most of this hype appears to be coming from grifters who aren't actually connected to the project. So, it's there, but not the fault of the people doing the work.
This has come up in a few recent statements by the project lead, including scammy memecoins and name-sniping. One source:
Gas Town has a very clear "mad scientist/performance art" sort of thing going on, and I love that. It's taking a premise way past its logical conclusion, and I think that's fun to watch.
I haven't seen anything to suggest that Yegge is proposing it as a serious tool for serious work, so why all the hate?
First time hearing about this tool and person. Just looked for a youtube video about it and he was recently interviewed and sounds very serious / bullish on this agentic stuff. I mean he's saying stuff like if you're still using IDEs you're a bad engineer. Basically you're 10x slower than people good at agenic coding. HR going to be looking for reasons for fire these dinosaurs. I'm paraphrasing, but not exaggerating. I mean it's shilling FOMO and his book. Whatever. I don't really care. I'm more concerned where things are headed.
Still a compelling value. I keep eyeing it to see if I should switch from 1Password, but I also worry about the complexity of transitioning the whole family over.
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