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by Barrin92 513 days ago
>I will never understand how you go back from a very customized editor setup

because when the very customized setup inevitably breaks the amount of headache you have is roughly proportionate to the amount of customization, whereas software with strong defaults tends to deal with that for you.

This is particularly the case with neovim which, in almost deliberate defiance of any systems thinking, just tends to consist of a few dozen moving parts loosely tied together and you have to sort of pray that updating some doesn't just break things. Paraphrasing Russ Ackhoff, if you take the best part of every car and put it together you don't get the best car, you get something that doesn't even drive, this is how I've felt more than once with very bespoke editor setups

2 comments

Haha this is so true. I stopped upgrading neovim when something little broke and I couldn't work out how to fix it an hour or so. It was something stupid like the column bar not having the right colour anymore.

Just hope that nothing breaks in an OS upgrade.

Yeah, they changed the default colorscheme in neovim at some point in the last year or so. I have an extremely minimal config and don't even use syntax highlighting or tab completions but I could not get it to render the way it used to. I wasted at least 30 minutes on this for absolutely no good reason. So I git bisected, made my own build (which took maybe 10-15 minutes) and will likely never upgrade neovim again.
I see people mentioning neovim "breaking" and to this day I have no idea what everyone is talking about. I have a very customized neovim setup, update almost every day, and quite literally have never experienced a single thing breaking.
I agree. Cramming a dozen of low quality plugins without understanding how they operate and hoping updating won't break things is not a great way to go.

I understand "just make it work" mentality, but it might be useful to have deeper understanding of a tool you use several hours everyday.