The movies have audiences believing that black and white windows are the hallmarks of professional computer use. Few, if any, take the time to display accurate screens to scenes. If you froze-frame popular movie scenes you’d be disappointed to notice that most screens are not apropos to the scene’s content.
I’ll start by sharing observations. Most of what you see in the movies are CLI(Command Line Interface) system monitors. It the equivalent of the system monitor in your machine just stripped of the graphical user interface that you’re used to. It displays information in the most basic of forms. So for a scene you could run several of these each displaying information about something. Say one for every read and write into the database, another for the current top processor task and so on. Idea is to have something that spits out something impressive.
Now; back earth.
A developer will monitor and perform tasks simultaneously. Basically they need to; see what they are developing (a product window), write code somewhere (the editor) and monitor behavior (server and log terminals).
A terminal is the black and white window allowing to type direct commands to the computer. It can be in many cases be used to monitor what the developer is working on. When you use the window to issue commands, that window is the CLI mentioned earlier but when the terminal is used to just monitor code behavior; it is then a ‘Log Terminal’.
The product window simply displays the result of your build. If you’re a web developer; this is most likely a browser. After new code has been saved, refreshing this window will display the changes made. If they so happen to break the build, then errors can either be displayed on this window or a Log Terminal.
The editor is where you will be writing the program code at. It could be something simple like a text pad or something elaborate. These are liberties you option. Not all of the code will be written on the editor; some of it will use terminal editors. Unlike the dedicated code editors, terminal editors do not offer language, class or live code analysis.
The mentioned is just the basic setup on normal day to day operations. However, not everyday is a normal one. For example you will at some point need to deploy your work to production. This means pushing your work to the cloud for everyone’s use. However the production machine lives in the cloud and does not possess the desktop background that we are used to. To do edits, configurations and basic set up, you will have no choice but to use the terminal for everything.
Multiple screens definitely do help. It becomes easier to have several windows on display at once and save you the work of switching between screens. It is tiring. Also, the set up convinces your girlfriend that you are a serious guy while simultaneously intimidating your friends. Monitoring your misery in real time is something to behold.
Somethings are default. Server interaction is always done in terminals. No one stops you from doing everything in the terminal on your build machine but who would you be impressing? Different programming specialties have different procedures. Some have IDEs(Integrated Code Editors). These combine everything into one window. It is not my style of work, I have tried it.
There you have it, a brief overview of a developer’s desktop. We know more about obscure creatures than those writing the code that runs our lives. This article simply gives an insight into our wild wide world.