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Comment by MauranKilom | Hacker News Reader

- Your eyes are the only broadband connection into the brain, and they have millenia of pattern recognition training built into them. When solving problems like debugging, refactoring or data preparation, consider arranging information in a way that takes advantage of this. When it's in the right shape, irregularities or patterns will often just jump at you.

- Relatedly, your eyes are also extremely well-adapted to detecting movement and optical flow. Do these two images/texts/logs/terminal outputs/etc. differ? Do they differ if you ignore the hue/time stamps/pwd? Alt-tab back and forth between them and you will notice. (Beware of fancy effects or menus covering it though - it has to be an instant switch from one to the other).

- Become fluent in regular expressions (recommendation: https://regexcrossword.com/).

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Oddly enough I can't use IDE's. They simply throw way too much information on the screen, and my brain gets overloaded. So I have to sheepishly confess that I do my programming in IDLE. There, I said it.

But I think a take-home lesson is that the "right" visual environment is a function of your eyes and your brain, and might not necessarily be the most sophisticated environment.

just wondering, why idle instead of vscode with minimal extensions, or sublime text maybe?

Excellent question. Actually my cube mate uses vscode and is happy with it, and the latest incarnations of WinPython come with vscode built in. So maybe I owe it to myself.

For now, my "IDE" is Idle on one side and Stackoverflow on the other. ;-)

> They simply throw way too much information on the screen

You can usually just hide them. I hide everything but the file explorer, the code itself and recently I turned on line numbers but no tool bar or task bar or that distracting mini map which I feel it serves no purpose than being cool for some people.

> - Your eyes are the only broadband connection into the brain, and they have millenia of pattern recognition training built into them.

This is also true of your ears. If you can find a way to convert what's going on into sound, you can very accurately pick up inconsistencies by ear.

(This is why you sometimes want to bring a stethoscope into the machine room.)

I spent a short time trying to find a pretty diff tool, but couldn't really find one to my liking. So just ended up using a bash function that did some decorating on the diff output.

Which OS? For macOS, Kaleidoscope is quite pretty.

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