Hyper 2, and why having an aesthetically pleasing Terminal is so important
Posted on July 11, 2018 at 11:45 PM
Hello all! I hope you had a nice week.
Today at work, myself and one of the other interns got into a discussion about Terminals. Yes, Terminals. Specifically, third-party terminals, along the likes of iterm2, Hyper, and the default MacOS terminal.
This other intern is an avid user of iterm2. If you walk past his desk, he consistently has it in full-screen mode, using multiple windows, and always showing off his hotkeys to the rest of the intern cohort.
I however, use and adore Hyper. While I used to use iterm2 myself, I swapped a few months back for a simpler, highly customizable terminal that I new would fit my day to day needs, while at the same time being very pleasing to look at. While functionality is important to me, Hyper's UI is what sold me to make the switch. (My current Hyper setup is pictured above)
This past week, Hyper2 was released, which came with a host of improvements that centered around making Hyper one of the most customizable external terminals on the market. Of course, I had to use this opportunity to try to convince this other intern that he was missing out on the superior workflow.
In a typical Software Engineering matter, we both stood our ground, and agreed to disagree on what the best external terminal is out on the market right now. However, it did get me thinking. If I didn't have this beautiful terminal, would I be as productive? Or is this something that just looks cool? Maybe having a neat looking terminal boosts my confidence?
This thought process took me back to my Freshman year at BU. I was attending a workshop on web dev near campus, and the student presenting the talk may have had the most extravagant terminal set up I had ever seen. I was absolutely mesmerized by it. Watching him quickly add and commit to git, while always knowing what branch he's on, and at the same time having the colors change whenever the language of the project changes? To me, it was as if I was watching the God of CS himself.
Hell, I'm not even sure if I learned any webdev that night. What I did observe, however, was confidence. This student leading to talk was so, so confident. Every command he entered in the prompt ran successfully, and I swear he never had to "ls" once as it appeared he had every path ever memorized on his machine. With the help of his terminal, he knew exactly what he was doing, for every action, without fail.
Flashback to today, it makes sense why he was so confident. That terminal was his baby, it was his home. I realize now he must've spent hours upon hours making every color and shortcut perfect for his workflow. This was his terminal. And since he created it, he knew how to use it and all of its features.
I bet if someone had made him use another machine, with a different setup, the workshop would've been atrocious. His command prompt was an extension of himself as a Software Engineer.
Thus, I believe making your terminal yours is so important. Sure they look cool. Sure sometimes experienced devs will use the pretty colors to intimidate newcomers. But they do serve a purpose. A purpose that perhaps not everyone can appreciate until they use a similar setup themselves, but a significant purpose none the less.
Tricking out your terminal can make you more confident, and in turn, a better programmer.
That's all I have for this week. I encourage you all to take a little bit of time and look into things like OhMyZsh and Hyper. If you never tried one of these extensions, I can assure you it's worth your time.
Until next time,
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