I was chatting about a related topic with my wife today. The premise was that there are many technology related blogs and not enough blogs about obscure topics (e.g., chocolate, woodworking). People interested in those obscure topics struggle to find genuine information because very few people are writing about them, much less making any content about them.
I think most of us in the technology field tend to forget just how many resources are out there for technical topics and often see blogging as a waste of time or a "whisper in the hurricane" when we should be encouraging people to keep writing about technical topics and more.
And also how searchable it is. The great thing with blogs for me is that I can relatively quickly skip to the part where the information is that I want, because usually I don't need all of it.
Admittedly I do subscribe to a woodworking YouTube channel but I would love more written content for the reasons you describe about skipping and skimming.
This is what Helix did right - putting essentials into the core. I'm still not sold on their editing model, even as someone new to modal editing and not encumbered by existing habits. The improvement is not that dramatic to justify abandoning the vim keymaps which you have in every editor. Also, it is missing features like debugger or git integration, so I will stick with Neovim for now. I do like, though, that they are choosing Scheme for extension language. That alone may convince me to switch in the future.
I agree. Helix has been the first TUI editor that I have been able to be productive on. With Emacs, vim and neovim, there was so much fiddling just to get started. And the more functionality I added, the slower and bigger the editors became, so I kept going back to the JetBrains suite and vscode.
With Helix, it was love at first sight. I like how discoverable its UI is. I prefer the modal approach of Helix where movement goes first, so that I can see over what what and where my action will take place. I like not having to fiddle with plugins. I like the defaults, meaning my config file fits on my screen and there's still vertical space to spare.
Helix is amazing and so portable, I switched entirely off graphical ides to it when I started needing to do dev from multiple machines and couldn't keep my files synced on the dev server with any of the graphical ides and after I tried neovim for a couple weeks and found it difficult to maintain. Now I just mosh to the machine > source my venv when necessary > hx
I did the same and don't regret it. My Helix config is 4 lines and it does 95% of what I want. The performance of a ton of neovim plugins is also atrocious and I always hated that everything was a hodgepodge mix of C, vimscript and Lua.
I agree, Neovim's LSP support is in a pretty good spot now. I still use Mason but perhaps I could spend time moving away from it.
The only issue I have with Neovim is sometimes a plugin update breaks things and I have to fix it immediately otherwise Neovim greets me with an error each time I use it. That's not so bad on the surface but it usually involves me reading the plugin documentation to see what changed and what Lua needs updating.
In my opinion the community wasn't asking for free labor but rather consistency on macOS, which is a supported target for Alacritty.
It's silly to fork for an icon change but it's also frustrating to have an icon change get overridden each update. Most of the community agreed with the icon change and some even offered assets or assistance implementing it. I have no malice towards the maintainer but I do believe their stance was unnecessarily combative.
Oh Zellij, I forgot to mention that! I installed it a few weeks ago with the intention of replacing tmux but then I thought about using Ghostty to replace tmux and haven't configured my keybindings yet. Zellij is pretty slick and beginner friendly like you mentioned.
I met some great people along the way that I'm glad to have gotten the opportunity to work with. Godspeed all!
reply