> The clearest sign a tool is serving you is that you stop noticing it—it becomes invisible.

It is because you are already very familiar with and accustomed to this tool.

The main meaning of the author probably is (from one article):

We need to remember that the purpose of using tools is to solve specific problems and achieve goals.

No tool is perfect. When using the useful functions of a tool, we also need to tolerate or ignore some of its shortcomings. Don't seek out or switch to a new tool simply because of some insignificant flaws. In the process of selecting and using tools, don't have the perfectionism, and always keep the goal in mind. The important thing is to master the useful functions of the tools to quickly, effectively, and efficiently complete tasks or goals, thereby significantly improving efficiency and productivity, rather than constantly complaining, switching tools, and wasting time and energy.

For the tools we choose, one must become truly familiar with and proficient in their use, continuously customize, modify, and improve them, and strive to use them to the fullest extent, thereby significantly improving efficiency and productivity, and solving practical problems and achieving goals faster and better.

Reminds me of this quote:

"We notice the person who is for ever bowing and fussily servile, and perhaps say, How humble he is! But the truly humble person escapes notice: the world does not know him."

~ Tito Colliander

I think this missed the emotional experience of using a tool.

My kitchen knives are decent knives, but no hand-forged Japanese masterpieces. Using them is a joy though, because I have an ingrained understanding of their ergonomics and how they cut.

I remember how clumsily I handled them at first. I take them to a sharpener regularly.

That experience of built-up familiarity puts me into a state of mind where I feel competent and joyful.

This is also true for my mechanical keyboard and some reference books I keep around my desk.

They are not necessarily the best possible tools, but they’re gateways to who I am at my best in different disciplines.

A corollary to this I've experienced (and observed in many others) is that maintainers of good tools will very often have a much more negative perception of how users collectively view their tool than how they view it in reality. It can be hard to tell the difference between "10 users complained to me today about bugs/missing features and 9990 used it without issue" and "10 users complained to me today about bugs/missing features and 90 used it without issue", despite there being a huge amount of effort needed to go from having 90% user satisfaction and 99.9%.

I have a strong suspicion that this is a major factor in why so many open source maintainers experience burnout; the unhappy users are going to be more visible than the happy ones, and the fraction unhappy new users needed to produce the same volume of bug reports/feature requests goes down with respect the to rate at which new people start using something. This essentially creates an illusion to the maintainer that no matter how much they work to improve things, nothing they do has made a difference in the overall quality of what people experience, and that saps the motivation to keep going.

I don't really have a good solution to this problem. The only obvious answer is to be more vocal with praise when something works well, but that's the type of collective action problem that tends to not really ever happen in reality. I've personally tried to go out of my way to give frequent and enthusiastic positive feedback when something works well for me, but unless everyone starts doing this, I'm not going to be able to make too much of a difference.

GUI tools were better in the 90s when interfaces were more standardized, and I think the "invisibility" factor was a big part of it. I don't want to have to learn a company's whole design philosophy system because they thought building a packaged web app was "cooler" than using a standard widget toolkit. I find myself using the terminal more and more as time goes on, because I find the total friction to be less when things are predictable. I'd probably not have left the GUI world if we were all still using some modern equivalent of user32.dll.

> The clearest sign a tool is serving you is that you stop noticing it—it becomes invisible. You don’t celebrate its flaws because you’re not turning them into a hobby, rather you just get mildly annoyed and route around them.

I think this is more dependent on the user than on the tool. Surely, different tools will attract different users and we can probably measure strong correlation.

I also think this position lacks balance. Your tool is never perfect, sometimes you realize you could improve it, and you should balance implementing the change with the effect it'd have on your habits. Sure, the longer you use your tool, the smaller those changes are, but your usage evolves throughout your life, and it's only natural that your tools do so to.

Invisible work doesnt lead to promotion, hence FAANG companies stopped making invisible+good tools, if things are invisible they get deprecated or stay in KTLO and eventually die

Well said. I do get the appeal of a somewhat fiddly tool though. Tool gives you a little puzzle each day, then you solve it! A little puzzle solved/accomplishment a day keeps people sane. Plus I think it's just nice to feel like you really understand the tool you're using and know it's 'language' for lack of a better word.

I think I've fallen into the same camp of getting tired of things not 'just working' out of the box. Now I'm always happy to use something with less friction over more.

Would I like to use something with community plugins like VS Code and configure it to be exactly what I want? Sure. But everything where I work was designed for bigger editors like QTCreator and then VS - so that's what I use because it has the least friction with our workflow. Would I like to get the absolute best hi-fi music player application? Sure. But HQPlayer is a pain to learn and configure, so I just went with the far-more-user-friendly MusicBee.

Friction is fun when you're young and have time and energy to burn. Less so once work becomes part of the normal routine.

Great article.

Every time there's a post here on git and I read the comments, I keep thinking of all the years I've used fossil and how it's been completely invisible, in the background, letting me get ahead with my work.

Finally someone put my thought on this topic into words! (Hopefully the author used a suitably invisible tool to write this.)