Hackers' screen shots

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74605

by davidw • 19 years ago

49 101 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

After reading the article on fonts, I thought it might be kind of fun to share screen shots of our working environment. Just remember to edit out anything sensitive!

davidw4• 19 years ago

Here's mine:

http://www.dedasys.com/Screenshot.png

BrandonM• 19 years ago

That's about what mine looks like, except I usually have a browser window under the main terminal window, and I only use two workspaces instead of ten (!)

davidw4• 19 years ago

The browser is located in the lower left hand workspace, so it's just an alt-down arrow away from the workspace.

german• 19 years ago

Ubuntu! Great Choice.

chengmi• 19 years ago

I don't think 10 desktops is enough... best to double it. =)

mdemare5• 19 years ago

Tada: http://inglua.com/blog/screenshot.png

cglee• 19 years ago

Need to increase test coverage :)

dcurtis• 19 years ago

Wow, Mac OS X in non-widescreen. For some reason, seeing it like that is a jarring experience.

mdemare5• 19 years ago

I hate widescreen, I'd use portrait mode if my monitor could pivot.

henning2• 19 years ago

this is from some loser named Don Knuth: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/screen.jpeg

amichail• 19 years ago

This would be better:

http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/screenshots.en.html

abstractbill4• 19 years ago

I'm sure my desktop would look pretty stark to most people. That's the way I like it though. Basically I only ever have two windows open, both maximized - Emacs and FireFox. I spend 90% of my time in Emacs - this is what it looks like:

http://abstractnonsense.com/desktop.png

(that's not my code btw - it's a random python library).

If I knew of a way to hide even more superfluous stuff (window decorations, the menu bar) I would do it.

davidw4• 19 years ago

Wow - couldn't you squeeze in some more emacs windows on the right to visit more files at once? Or is that kind of thing just noise/distraction? I could certainly see some people preferring the simplicity to my more noisy 3 emacs windows and 4 rxvt's.

abstractbill4• 19 years ago

Yup, it's just noise to me. I prefer to have the other buffers loaded in Emacs, but not displayed on the screen where I'll be distracted by them.

My perfect dev environment would go as far as blanking out everything in my peripheral vision too - maybe a set of VR goggles that only displays an Emacs window, dead center ;-)

akkartik5• 19 years ago

Switch to Linux :)

http://akkartik.name/desktop.html

mdemare5• 19 years ago

That's an utterly bizarre font you're using - otherwise... nice!

utnick• 19 years ago

you vi/emacs/console guys can hate, but deep down inside you wish your ide was as tight as this :) :)

http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/4349/desktopel7.jpg

nikolaj4• 19 years ago

yuck.

stuff like code folding and automagical code generation encourage all the wrong habits. Simple, readable, and reused code is "tight".

Zak4• 19 years ago

An upvote alone cannot express how much I agree. I spend a lot more time reading code (even my own) than I do writing it. Code generation and concise languages reduce the effort of writing code by similar amounts, but concise languages reduce the effort of reading code by an order of magnitude or two.

abstractbill4• 19 years ago

Heh. I think it's funny that the trend in modern IDEs is for your code to get squished into a smaller and smaller box in the middle, surrounded by a ton of random crap. It's the exact opposite to the environment I strive for.

(also, "Solution Explorer"? That was the best name they could come up with?)

akkartik5• 19 years ago

To be fair, he seems to have enough space for code. horizontally at least. Monitors today have plenty of space for random crap. But the bottleneck isn't real estate anymore, it's focus.

What we need is for the other windows to gradually fade out when focus is in this one for a while. One of the video plugins/sites on tv-links had this feature - as you watched a show for a while the rest of the screen would gradually fade out.

Or we could go with two vertical panes: http://akkartik.name/desktop.html :)

cstejerean3• 19 years ago

I don't know, in my 1900x1200 window I have quite a lot of room for things besides the code on the side, like a REPL window, etc.

rksprst2• 19 years ago

Yes, it's called "Solution Explorer" because when you use Team Foundation Server you open up solutions. So "Solution Explorer" is very appropriate.

ptn• 19 years ago

Bad Vista.

rksprst2• 19 years ago

Here's mine. Also Visual Studio.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1810430961&size=...

nostrademons5• 19 years ago

Page is private.

joshwa3• 19 years ago

here's mine:

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/3408/picture2jd3.png

Sorry for all the obfuscation.

Tiger, TextMate, Terminal.app, Locomotive, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium, Twitterpod. A few more in the titlebar (Desktopple, SpritedAway (obviously turned off for now), MenuMeters), and plenty more in the Dock.

thehigherlife• 19 years ago

is that adium as your chat window? if that is ichat how'd you get it to be borderless like that?

joshwa3• 19 years ago

yep, it's adium. "concise" contact list style, "group bubbles" window style.

noahlt2• 19 years ago

That's a beautiful color scheme. Where/how can I get it?

joshwa3• 19 years ago

which color scheme? if you mean the rainbow gradient I used to cover my private info, that's just one of the default patterns built into photoshop.

Adium is using the standard "Aqua" theme.

TextMate uses the standard "Twilight" theme.

nikolaj4• 19 years ago

my work workspace (OSX) http://nikolajbaer.us/media/desktop.jpg

at home its similar, but xfce4 terminals and pidgin on xubuntu.

tlrobinson• 19 years ago

viewbug?

nikolaj4• 19 years ago

ah, a project for a client.. damn i tried to snuff out things like that. It's just yet another media sharing site, we (I) built it in django with ffmpeg.

andrewfong• 19 years ago

http://andrewfong.com/stuff/Picture%201.png

Firefox is hidden and gets called up as necessary. If I have access to a separate monitor, it gets shoved onto there.

Zak4• 19 years ago

http://64.74.153.35/~zak/screen.png

Normally 1680x1050, but I'm using an external monitor until I find time to get my laptop's LCD fixed.

mdemare5• 19 years ago

Can you live with that font? No anti-aliasing and Courier New?

Zak4• 19 years ago

It was good enough for...

Actually, yes. It's quite readable and fairly compact. I've tried a few other fonts (most of the ones mentioned in the fonts thread on here) and found most of them take up more space or are less readable. Dejavu Sans Mono might look better with anti-aliasing turned on, but most of the time I've found anti-aliasing just makes fonts look blurry.

nostrademons5• 19 years ago

Mine: http://labs.diffle.com/screenshot.png

hailpixel2• 19 years ago

I seriously don't understand how you people can work with all the visual clutter. I like a much more naturalistic approach:

http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/217/workspacefh6.gif

cstejerean3• 19 years ago

I used to live with visual clutter before I discovered virtual desktops. I now usually keep my windows maximized and just switch desktops when I need to go to a different window.

mdemare5• 19 years ago

Nice. http://inglua.com/blog/images/c64.png

Lack of syntax highlighting is very easy on the eyes.

hailpixel2• 19 years ago

I think its time to make a new texteditor / micro-ide

adnam• 19 years ago

SDF has something like this: http://www.deskshots.org/

jey• 19 years ago

http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/screenshots/ion3-2.png

OK, not really my desktop. But ion is quite cool.

About 50% of my programming time is spent staring at a maximized vim instance, and about 30% staring at a maximized firefox instance: http://jey.kottalam.net/tmp/screenshot.png

omouse• 19 years ago

I actually do run ion3. The only problem I've had so far is that some of the Alt+ keyboard shortcuts interfere with some Emacs shortcuts. One off the top of my head: Alt+G.

aaroniba2• 19 years ago

I just remap/unmap the ion shortcuts to get out of the way of emacs. I have a friend who swears by setting ion's Mod1 to capslock, but my pinky just can't handle that.

almost• 19 years ago

Set Ion's mod key to super (aka the windows key) and everything starts playing nicely :p

ajmoir• 19 years ago

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/133/396296975_1f2e6f41a6_b.jp...

Linux running Xfce.

Couple of VMs a Xnest and DVD player. And I say again the current way we layout apps is broken. I have a wide screen monitor and most apps do not resize. I anybody working on something to fix this so that an app designed for 640x480 renders a reasonable size on my screen.

programnature• 19 years ago

My setup in Mathematica...

http://www.programnature.org/Screenshot.png

brlewis• 19 years ago

My emacs-centric working environment:

http://brlewis.com/y/2007/devscreen.png

It's slightly contrived, in that I usually have only one buffer open. I wanted to show that my environment involves switching back and forth between my ideas.txt file where I aggressively prioritize, and the actual BRL and Scheme files where the real coding is done. A large portion of my work is done in 35-minute train rides.

kingnothing4• 19 years ago

http://aycu09.webshots.com/image/32248/2004585555465429860_r...

Software: Ubuntu 7.10, Netbeans, Opera. Hardware: 2 x 1280x1024 monitors.

Edit: Whoa, apparently webshots doesn't like PNGs. Try this link instead.

http://img444.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshotzh0.png

mqt• 19 years ago

http://www.csh.rit.edu/~apox/images/screenshots/20071031.png

My four desktops merged into one image. I'm using FreeBSD+ion.

aaroniba2• 19 years ago

+1 for ion! brilliant window manager. I don't know how I could be as productive without it.

apgwoz• 19 years ago

I love the emacs color scheme.

nikolaj4• 19 years ago

as an RIT CS grad ('03), I cackled when i saw your desktop.. very CSH :)

slashcom• 19 years ago

Girl Talk: excellent choice of hacking music.

imsteve• 19 years ago

Downloading now. If you're wrong then die. Free beer otherwise.

nmeyer• 19 years ago

Eclipse, vim and Opera. I like my syntax highlighting scheme, but not many people like colors as much as I do.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/59/workspace.PNG

davidw4• 19 years ago

Wow, that really is colorful, isn't it!

llimllib• 19 years ago

http://billmill.org/static/images/desktop.png

kingnothing4• 19 years ago

I have no clue how so many of you are only working on one monitor. Maybe you've never tried using two, but there's absolutely no way I could ever code again on just one.

The difference is night and day.

abstractbill4• 19 years ago

I've tried working on multiple monitors, several times. It doesn't work for me.

copenja2• 19 years ago

Just curious, but what doesn't work for you about multiple monitors?

copenja2• 19 years ago

I concur. I can't believe how many single monitor setups there are.

I am also surprised that more people don't use split screen setups where they can view multiple pages of code within the same window (ala emacs,gvim, Visual Studio). I prefer to have around four but atleast two views of code open at once.

nostrademons5• 19 years ago

Some of us value the ability to hack in bed over the extra screen real estate.

dfranke2• 19 years ago

Screen real estate is like a drug. Addiction creeps up on you quickly, and the more you have the more you think you need. I used to be perfectly content with one 17" monitor. Now I'm looking for a bigger desk so that I can add a fourth 22" LCD.

kingnothing4• 19 years ago

A fourth?

Wow. That's awesome.

alexfarran• 19 years ago

I tried it and it made my neck hurt. I prefer a virtual desktop if I want multiple workspaces. Why move your head when you can make the screen move for you?

alaskamiller• 19 years ago

i have 6 spaces open on my macbook pro. i run firefox, safari and mozilla. use adium, transmit, photoshop, terminal, and ituens on a daily basis.

damien2• 19 years ago

Standard Emacs/terminal/Firefox on my laptop:

http://img524.imageshack.us/my.php?image=desktopak6.png

When I'm docked at work, I usually have Emacs on the monitor and terminal on my laptop screen.

nostrademons5• 19 years ago

As of now, the technology count is:

 Languages:
 4 Ruby
 4 Python
 4 C/C++
 2 Java
 2 Lisp
 1 HTML
 1 Scheme
 1 Mathematica
 1 Javascript

 Editors:
 8 Emacs
 5 Vim
 1 Visual Studio
 1 Eclipse
 1 Netbeans

 Browsers:
 8 Firefox
 2 Opera
 1 IE

 OS:
 11 *nix
 8 MacOS
 2 Windows

Possibly modulo a couple of miscountings. If people had multiple programs open (like one person with both Firefox and IE, or my own setup with Windows + Ubuntu VM), both are counted. I omitted obvious jokes, like the Commodore 64 screenshots or Don Knuth's desktop. And it only includes editors I could identify, so whatever you Mac folks are using to edit your Ruby isn't included.

akkartik5• 19 years ago

Nice. My desktop is a few years old, so subtract one from the C/C++ camp. I use python and ruby equally, though, so it doesn't help break that tie.

boucher3• 19 years ago

Most of these people seem to be using TextMate. Personally, I prefer SubEthaEdit.

david• 19 years ago

http://webdever.net/screen.png

I could use a bigger screen...

hauk• 19 years ago

Leopard, of course, with 4 spaces and xcode split-screen, Ubuntu 7.10 running under parallels. http://tildeslash.com/images/screenshot.png

Goladus• 19 years ago

http://www.goladus.com/images/wokr1.png

Cygwin, firefox, emacs, C, yacc, putty, outlook, python. (There's php in one of the emacs windows)

brianr• 19 years ago

Here's mine:

http://www.stanford.edu/~brianrue/workspace.png

I just alt-tab between Zend and firefox/konsole; at work I run another screen of Firefox off my windows laptop. I don't know how a lot of you can live with so much clutter on your screen, it drives me crazy.

jmtame• 18 years ago

http://www.flickr.com/photos/67154802@N00/2473330790/sizes/l...

Hackers' screen shots

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