That’s exactly it. I completely disagree with my own opinion!

Context

I wrote 3 blogposts about text editors:

• On text editors, on which I wrote about my text editor hopping journey and features I like (at the moment).
• A Review On My Own Post On Text Editors, on which I wrote about the Unix philosophy, graphical desktops, modes of editing and a bunch of other stuff.
• Another Update On Text Editors, on which I wrote about getting into Plan 9 From Bell Labs

And I completely disagree with my opinion on those posts, so I’ll address my new philosophy here.

From Arch to Alpine, back to Arch and them… Fedora?

As I said in the previous post of this series, I really switched my main machine to Alpine, due to minimalism philosophy. And it was terrible. I stayed with it for sometime, until all the problems on living computing as it was the 90’s finally made me go back to an operating system with modern goodies.

So I went back to Arch as it was the system I knew. But man, it requires effort.

I already understood, while using Plan 9 software, that “high customizability” isn’t actually a good thing (I’ll not evolve this, maybe I’ll write a proper argument and not a mere “my experience” sometime), but I was still a minimalist. This time, though, I wanted something that just works and has the software I need. So I installed Fedora. And I loved it.

I loved it because it just worked. GNOME is great, it just works, it’s efficient, and the interface does not create mental overhead on it’s use. Yeah, it wastes some resources. Ok, at least the keyring works, the network works, the audio works, the bluetooth works. Everything I want just works and is easy to use.

Ok then, and the editor?

I got myself thinking about LSP. I used to think it was distracting, and just compiling after writing solved all the issues that could be solved by LSP. But what I noticed is that when I actually must not get distracted, I’m not coding: I’m using pen and paper to figure out what I have to code. And so LSP can actually be very useful for my workflow.

So I tried to use Emacs again. But I really did not like the way mouse works, even with the menu bar enabled.

Well, there’s that very popular editor with good LSP and mouse support…

Yeah I went back to Visual Studio Code.

Conclusions

There’s just nothing more to comment on. It’s very obvious why this is just better than everything I was doing for the last years.

Oh, actually, there’s one more thing to comment: I only have language plugins in VS Code (except for GitHub Copilot). Default dark+ theme, no other plugins.