@alvan I have felt this conflict for years. I spent last year exploring the smaller tool approach, with helix, various LSPs, tmux, fzf, starship et al. It worked reasonably well, and I enjoyed the experience.

However, I’m back in emacs now, using it as my terminal multiplexer too. With project.el, the modern completion stack, vterm, eglot, treesitter, key suggestions, marginalia and org, it’s just faster and easier for me to get work done across the various projects I touch daily.

The pendulum may swing back to, but the unified ui and keystrokes for instant navigation between exact places and operations across a dozen projects is hard to replicate with a distinct term multiplexor.

It’s no fun if think you have to pick one solution forever tho.

@justine i use the built in, but I also only use vi for admin tasks and simple edits. Beyond that, i end up in emacs and was never happy with nvim/tmux when fully kitted out as a terminal coding or doc writing environment.

Maybe you can relate, but I find a conflict between my drive for minimalism and simplicity in the composition of the system, and my direct appreciation of the system as a daily driver — how it makes me feel when I first sit down to work, and how it feels in hour 8 of work.

I found that prioritizing feel over minimalism and simplicity just a bit — keeps me happy

@kentpitman @davefischer @tomjennings
> I don't think the enabling thing was just at these people were
> smart. I think it's that they had the freedom to explore. Market
> economies are based on scarcity being valuable, but this economy was
> not based on that and so it didn't have to hoard software, it could
> share it.

See the world, you have built it, with shoulders of iron.
See the world, but it's not yours, say the stealers of Zion.
- The Clash - The Equaliser

My relationship to free software over my 30 years as a developer is founded upon the fact that it is what enabled my career. I didn't go to college, or have a local peer group. Learning linux, and using free tools to build my own workstation, clusters, and eventually, becoming a lisp programmer, would not happen with the generous sharing of others. I was able to share much of my work as open source, because little was actually depending upon the license.

I agree with you, we should not confuse the visible and valorized "capitalist economy" with the entirety of the socio-economic systems that we depend on, build, and flourish within.

@kentpitman @tomjennings @davefischer
> EMACS was part of a soup of parallel efforts that got whittled down
> because managing your own was a pain, and for some it meant more
> trading away their own ideas for someone else's just to get out from
> under maintenance burden.

This makes me curious what was the cause of the maintenance work? OS
churn? Porting to new hardware? New file formats? Evolution of
the underlying programs and tools that they invoked?