I know this is not always true. But the same people who like cursor still are the same people who are less familiar with the terminal.

And I don't know what it is but it feels the less familiar you are with a terminal, the less skilled you tend to be.

Definitely not a 100% case. But has been common in my experience

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yoyohello13 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's more of a sign of a good engineer. I know a number of engineers that are good and don't really work with the terminal. On the other hand, every engineer I've worked with who was a 'terminal guy' was great. I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level.

	▲	gogasca an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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w29UiIm2Xz 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I strongly disagree with the parent commenter. I use cursor because it shows its thinking with more detail and much faster than Claude. That way, I can stop it in its tracks if went off the rails. Claude seems slow to me. No relation to engineering caliber.

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digitaltrees an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Totally disagree. I find people still using cursor or other IDE centric flows want to review the code and be more interactive. Claude Code and Codex push agent autonomy and speed. Sorry but they go off the rails too much.

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dropofwill an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cursor has a terminal based app that’s just as good as any of the other mainstream ones…

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anthonypasq an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

why do annoying engineers have such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI.

Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session. Why on earth would i not want the ability to open/edit a file manually in the tool im using to write code.

can someone please explain this to me?

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ghshephard 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

As someone who has spent the last 10+ years working in Tmux - but is entirely comfortable on Mac, Windows and Linux desktop environments - here are the key reasons why the terminal experience is superior for me.

- I work a lot with data - and streaming data through text tools is twitch fast. If someone has a question about data - before anybody else can log in to their superset, or analytics database, and try and work through the SQL queries or charts to get the answer - I've already jammed the data through awk and got an answer.

- As an SRE - I work with a lot of systems that have pretty rich APIs - so being able to send a request, get the answer back in json, dump it into jq, select the parts I care about - maybe -c to compress it and ripgrep a subset out - is just fast.

- I work in a lot of contexts with a lot of different systems, datacenters, applications - tmux lets me keep all of them cleanly organized in a separate windows and subpanes. I'll have 15-20 windows open per week, and maybe a 5-6 panes in each- keeping 100+ different contexts (and scroll backs, bash history) - all nicely organized is really useful.

- I'm also a systems guy - and there is no other way to dig into a system but the terminal - netstat, ps, dmesg, /proc - these are all components that have only one credible path to investigation and discovery. If you aren't super comfortable in the terminal - zero way to learn about this stuff.

- Working remotely - means ssh. So - once again - terminal.

The Focus on the terminal is that it's the best tool (and in some cases the only tool) for so many of these tasks - and by performing these tasks a lot - you learn about systems - so the people who spend a lot of time in the terminal tend to know a lot more about systems than people who don't.

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ok_dad an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Different strokes for different folks, but unfortunately they take their opinions and preferences as a sign that others are inferior.

	▲	digitaltrees an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yah this judgment and arrogance is so annoying in tech. And worse it stops us from learning. Some of the best lessons of my career were when a new developer asked a question often taken for granted or we implemented a design pattern to make coding more approachable.

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anthonypasq an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

why do annoying engineers has such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. And guess what, you can just open a terminal in cursor! who knew!?

Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session.

can someone please explain this to me?

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stephc_int13 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I am not one of them but quite a few programmers prefer not having to use the mouse at all when working.

The terminal is an old but astonishingly powerful user interface that is still evolving.

Good terminals can be very snappy and configurable in ways that most GUI are not.

There is also arguably an aesthetic/fetishism appeal to it.

I've worked in the terminal at some point of my career, as there was not many other choices, and I understand how someone can get really used to it.

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robocat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What's a polite way to suggest you ask AI first?

Why should others spend their valuable time helping you? Especially when you insult the people you want to answer you "fetish/superiority complex" just demonstrates your own prejudice.

Personally I ask AI for a summary of positions, and prompt to provide some good articles on a subject - ideally articles from supporters of either side.

	▲	anthonypasq an hour ago \| parent [-]
		id prefer a human to explain it to me

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xur17 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Speed and scriptability

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Pxtl an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly the TUI in most of these coding agents is so fancy I have trouble thinking of them as "terminal". I use Pi Coding Agent and the fact that it's terminal means it's easy to run inside something properly sandboxed in a YOLO mode using normal bash commands instead of relying on individually sandboxed tools.

Once I got the tmux settings for proper scrolling and whatnot it feels fine. Honestly the TUI of tmux is the one that really enrages me - so much complexity for just "I want to switch terminals on my remote".