One downside of using LSPs and formatters external to your editor, is that you now have an exponential explosion in language runtimes and dependencies. I love it when using #HelixEditor on my #nix or other managed, modern workstation, but it becomes a liability when working on tiny machines like my new #orangePiRv2

I went to install marksman, a markdown LSP and discovered it was written in #fsharp -- a language I work in and enjoy, but whose runtime is not ported to risc-v

Now, before turning this into a rant about the sorry state of software, I want to recognize that we all make choices about what dependencies and capabilities we want, and we have many places we can settle on that continuum between 'nostdlib' and node on nix.

If there is a large-scale, or long-term phiiosophical insight from this experience, it is that learning to use the features in helix for selection and alignment allowed me to edit markdown tables very quickly. That was the reason I wanted marksman in the first place.

Working on the basics of typing, and editing, memorization, consistent naming, and simplicity will pay off every time.

In search of some change, some excitement, and new ideas, I have set down some of the tools I have grown to love over the last three decades as a software engineer. I don't have some big critique of them, or their communities, but simply seek novelty to invigorate my relationship with my work. Perhaps I will pick some of them back up, with fresh insights.

The #HelixEditor is perhaps my favorite new tool. I have wanted to deeply learn a modal text editor for years, and with the proliferation of tree-sitter and lsp tooling for so many languages, changing editors became much easier. Of course, #emacs is not an editor, as much as a text focused lisp desktop environment, but there was space and time to try out the new tool.