@kirby @Hyperhidrosis
If you find yourself jumping to and fro the same blocks of code, check out bookmarks in Vim — probably the thing you need 🤷
But in general, you shouldn't be working on many things at the same time — keep focused, finish one function, make sure it works, then get back to the part that was supposed to call it, make your changes atomic — it will also make your commit log cleaner and easier to navigate.
@kirby @Hyperhidrosis
Don't get me wrong, I've also hated this approach: when you start working on a drawing, start with sketching out, then start working out details. Why the hell should I do it when I see that an eye would be here and I want to work on it right now.
But with time I grew to understand that it just doesn't work and that working on things in proper order helps you avoid lots of problems in the future and in the end helps keep the job as a whole done faster.
I'm pretty sure I'm just not experienced enough to be participating in debates like these, keep rethinking my arguments and then i realize there are a lot of cases I didnt think of and have not even experienced myself yet. Sorry
@kirby @Hyperhidrosis
It's fine — that's exactly what I do, sharing things I have figured out myself with time.
Of course you don't have to follow others' workflows to the letter and expect them to work for you, just try different approached and see for yourself what makes you more productive. There's no "righteous way" here — there are things that work for you (or at all) and things that don't.
@kirby @Hyperhidrosis
And as for navigating others' code — search indeed does wonders if this code isn't a complete pile of garbage.
Take Pleroma's code for example — you can easily find where things are happening just by calling grep and looking at the context a few times — you find what you want and call grep again.
You don't really have to use all these funky class browsers or have five files open at the same time.
Ever notice that most of the high tech paraphrenalia is there to help incompetent programmers not the good ones?
It's not unique to software development — people are being treated the same way: as mass-produced goods. And from the point of cost-efficiency it might even make sense: skilled specialist doesn't cost cheap, they don't grow on trees and they might have their own opinion that you at least have to take it into account. Replacing him/her with five less skilled on the surface might cost more, but it's easier to find them and if they happen to not play along, you can easily replace each of them with another — just like the old one. Under this angle, investing into tools that would make these guys even more cost-efficient (cheaper) makes perfect sense.
Most left wing movements don't seem to realise that unions and other such tools don't really fix that — they are still being treated as replaceable cog wheels, it's just now every box of these cog wheels would come with extra conditions. Some even go and work for the likes of Google — with the intent of improving it (attempts at futile as with girls from "I can fix her" memes), eventually they become parts the system themselves — but with all money made in the process it's not too shabby anymore, admitting that you were wrong or that you have given up on the other hand — still hard. That is how a lot of people become more conservative I think: no important realisation happens, just a posteriori rationalisation that they aren't bad people.
Most people are fine with mass-produced goods on personal level: indeed, why sharpen your tools — when you can always get a replacement? And with all this progress happening, that something probably got even better since your got your last one. Then they start wondering why are they being treated like cattle by the likes of Microsoft, or Lenovo, or Apple? Because you are still buying that shit! You have choice — go get something from a smaller company and pay with money out of your wallet and with your time by contributing, to be treated differently. But no… Again, mass-produced thing being immediately cheaper doesn't defeat the shortcomings that might become evident later.
Again, most don't even think about it: "The system isn't broken, it just doesn't work they way I want it to — because it's unaware of the issue, just give me the button to let it know, gimme-gimme-gimme!"
I've always been lucky to be surrounded with the people who were into DIY or handmade stuff, but I have never valued it until I realised there might be longer term consequences of this, much less obvious than immediate cost-efficiency. Dealing with mass-produced goods ruins the sense of ownership and treating yourself as a replaceable cog wheel ruins the sense of autonomy — uncle Ted was exactly right about that. That's what struck me the most when I've been re-reading Industrial Society during COVID lock downs.
A lot of people can't imagine existing outside of the system and some of them got completely unable accomplishing even the most basic things on their own. That had severe consequences for the mental health of the society.
As for multitasking and having shorter attention span, if I was into that I could probably come up with a good conspiracy that it's being done on purpose — but I just don't believe that someone clever first came up with this and then was able to carry it out so immaculately — people are too incompetent for this. I think it's just a natural order of things and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Actually, not having to multitask nowadays is rather a privilege, dealing with all the information and stream of microscopic events happening at an extremely rapid pace might make you paranoid and eventually will drive you to insanity. To protect your mental health you have to give up some of the control, "slide" — but of course it gets exploited and with giving up control you often get sold things that might be outright harmful to you. In addition to that, not willing to play along, even if you are just asking to give you time to think, is often treated as aggressive behaviour by the society. Sadly, not many are able to stand their ground when peer pressure comes into play — and doing so if often even discouraged. This is wrong!
Not playing along is okay: be it the "popular" crowd or the less popular. Some manual labour every now and then isn't boring and lame — it feels refreshing and when you see the result, it feels good. Making your own things and repairing old ones instead of buying new and shiny is great — and it has more to do with preserving nature than using the water you've boiled eggs in to make coffee 😏
Maybe I was just lacking perspective earlier, but to me it looks like there is progress here — on Fedi and on Gemini there are a lot of people like that. But maybe I'm just becoming one of those survivalist dudes, who dig their own bunkers, myself and I have found my crowd 🤪
@kirby @Hyperhidrosis @m0xee
Okay, now this has even less to do with mice, text editors or even computers at all, so I'm going to stop right here 😂
@kirby @Hyperhidrosis
I used to have lots of traits that today are attributed to zoomers: being able to have conversations with five different people with completely different contexts at the same time…
But I grew to realise that it's not a valuable skill at all — it just ruins your ability to concentrate and when you need it you just can't. Being able to concentrate for most type of tasks is a much more valuable skill.
I think that a lot of this has nothing to do with mice or text editors.