[marssaxman]

> Why not invest some time and money into making your tools more ergonomic and enjoyable?

I did that for many years. After switching from one machine to the next, one operating system to the next, one IDE to the next, everything constantly changing, year after year - I found myself in a job where I had to reinstall the OS and everything on it from scratch, every two weeks, for a year, because... well. Because! By the time that was over, I had given up customizing much of anything at all, and that has been working out all right ever since.

[zelphirkalt]

Why not keep your config externally available and reuse when setting up again? With Emacs that is easily possible.

[marssaxman]

That would not have helped much with the jobs where I needed to use some proprietary IDE, or which involved some OS on which Emacs was poorly supported.

(If I had already been an Emacs fan, I suppose I could have found some way to forcibly bodge things together and use my preferred editor regardless: but I'm afraid it's never appealed to me.)

[mananaysiempre]

Tangible (e.g. file- or even better text-file-based) configuration helps here—this is less a fault of customization in general and more of opaque configuration systems.

[hollander]

Reinstall every other week. Haven't done that since Windows 98.