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Comment by hobo_mark | Hacker News Reader

You might not have the luxury of a GUI in many (most?) production (or staging, for that matter) environments.

Should you be spending a lot of time in the production environment though? Also, in many places, the list of things you can do in the production environment is quite short (viewing logs or reconfiguring things), because the app runs off a Docker-or-whatever container and is written in a compiled language (so you can’t just hack together a bugfix in vim on the production server).

The popular explanation of “hacker” is someone spending 100% of their time inside production environments.

This explanation doesn't do it for me because you also wouldn't be able to run any text editor you like. Basically you're going to be using vi (or possibly vim or nano). It also shouldn't be a daily activity to be poking around directly on a production machine, and if it is then why not setup something like sshfs and use a local text editor on the file? Then you can use whatever GUI or TUI editor you'd like.

If you're not poking around often like you say, then something like vim is more than acceptable. And some people prefer that to a gui editor anyway.

Because what, you sit in the server room with a monitor plugged into the rack and work on production code?

If something can open a shell remotely, it can show a GUI remotely.

> If something can open a shell remotely, it can show a GUI remotely.

Secure servers do not include GUI packages. They are enormous, require elevated privileges, and have a poor security history.

And secure containers also don't allow shell access, so.

There are gradients of "secure" in servers.

No reasonably quasi-secure server in the last 25 years has included GUI packages, but has allowed and often depended on shell access.

Modern deployment regimes which include ephemeral instances sometimes do not permit shell access.

These are not the same things!

Microsoft shops beg to differ.

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