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Comment by zerosanity | Hacker News Reader

How is vim an obscure tool? I'm pretty sure quite a few people use vim daily. After looking over this list, I suspect it's also true for many listed programs.

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I knew most of them but not all. However as he targets OSX users, I suspect many of the programs are unknown to them.

Ah - thanks clarifying that he targets OSX people. I didn't think that dstat, xargs, curl, vim, screen, rsync, or ack were obscure; but it makes sense if it the audience is OSX users.

Why?

Not a dig at OSX users. I have a macbook in addition to a thinkpad running a less common distro in front of me right now. I'm thinking of it in a Bayesian way: if a person is a Linux user or an OSX user, I expect them to know all/most of those tools. However, given that a person (limited to Linux or OSX users) doesn't know about those tools, I expect them to be an OSX user.

I don't think OSX is specifically that important - I've met plenty of "new" linux users who have no idea htese tools exist either - linux has a gui too, you know.

Converseley, there are plenty of long-term unix experts out there who also find that a mac makes a nice workstation that still satisifies their need for unix tools plus other stuff.

Please see my earlier response to mitjak, i think it addresses both of your points.

I don't think he's targeting OS X. He just has an OS X skin on his UI. Some of these tools absolutely will not run on OS X.

Out of curiosity, which?

Edit: looking at the site again, at least one of those screenshots is from OS X. htop lists /sbin/launchd and several processes from /Library/Frameworks.

Nice catch, I thought the same as GP because of powertop.

There really is no "target" audience of this post. :) It just started out as a list of "recommended" tools, then people started suggesting stuff -- some of which I knew, some of which I don't, some of which run on every unix, some only on Linux.

And it was easiest to take the screenshots from my OS X laptop. For some tools, like powertop, I had SSH-d into various Linux or FreeBSD boxes.

Some of these are uncommon enough that they are not ported to every package manager system, too. :(

quite a few people uses vim daily?? My life is spent inside vim :) -- ups sorry got the wrong impression.. You should use sarcasm tag. Shame on you!

vim is actually more popular than Emacs (FOR NOW), so I don't really know where he's coming from on this one.

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