[skydhash]

I truly believe a lot of people don’t really realize how good it is when you have a good environment for development work. It’s straight thinking to doing. And it’s not even about vim/tmux or emacs. You can do so with sublime or IDEA. In the pragmatic programmer book, it’s called editor fluency.

[DrewADesign]

It’s a balance. It’s easy to spend more time dickering with tools than you save by having those tools. I used to have this amazing neovim setup that worked exactly like I wanted it to. Unfortunately, it was fragile, and while it was theoretically infinitely flexible, practically, it was too big of a PITA to change to be flexible on the run. Then a couple of unrelated plugin changes caused some big problems with my setup at the end of a big project and I pivoted to jetbrains stuff— specifically Rider, PyCharm, and WebStorm. There was a bit of a learning curve, but the discoverability of functionality was waaaaay better, and with a few single-click-install plugins for languages or environmental integrations, it did everything I needed it to do within 5 minutes on any machine I sat down at. I’ve moved on to other IDEs except for Rider, but I discovered that _for me_, learning how to do what I wanted to do in a well-designed batteries-included environment had a much bigger payoff than trying to manage a mini infrastructure project on my machine in parallel with whatever else I was working on.

[jeremyjh]

I did that same circuit (except it was emacs to VS Code) for me - same experiences and reasons. I also used CLion for a couple of years for C++ - but in that case I never even bothered trying to use anything else. I could not get the bindings quite how I wanted in either VS Code or CLion, but I made it tolerable eventually.

I'm on neovim now, and the reason is coding agents. It ported my Spacemacs bindings to Astrovim in a few minutes.

Any feature I need to add, I just tell it and its done in a couple of minutes. Anytime I run into something that doesn't work quite how I want, I just tell the agent and boom, done.

I manage all my dotfiles this way now I think it totally changes the calculus. I'm even considering giving Nix another go.

[theshrike79]

This is why I tend to gravitate towards either fully bespoke tools (made by me, for me, nobody else) or tools with sane defaults.

Emacs -> (n)vim -> hx for CLI editor. Helix just works out of the box pretty much, no need for a Doom Helix or Oh-my-Helix to get it comfortable to use.

In terminals I finally ended up on Ghostty, I think the only significant configuration I have is setting `macos-option-as-alt`.

As for shell, fish + starship prompt has been my choice for years now. Very little customisation needed for either.

And for all software I pick the one that stores its configuration in a sane format in a XDG compatible location so I can shove it into chezmoi easily (looking at you iTerm2).

[skydhash]

> Unfortunately, it was fragile, and while it was theoretically infinitely flexible, practically, it was too big of a PITA to change to be flexible on the run.

I don’t know. I switch back from neovim to vim for some reason, but that vim setup has followed me for years even when I switched to emacs. And while I changed my emacs settings every once in a while, it has always been stable to me.

I’m not questioning your choice, and I do use IDE when the needs arise. But my emacs setup is mostly about dealing with every language and most tech interactions that I need. Not to be a full featured IDE for a language or a project.

[DrewADesign]

I’m sure there‘a some minimum setup that would meet my needs and do ok— I just don’t really see a need to. The only time I get annoyed is when I need some of the deeper-cut ex commands and they’re not supported.