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I once happened to be with a coworker setting up VSCode on his new laptop. I was shocked by the reckless abandon with which he installed all kinds of third party extensions.

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First thing I do with a new Jetbrains IDE is add a bunch of plugins. It’s pretty much the way most IDEs roll.

Do you worry about malware?

Doesn’t the average emacs user load dozens of packages? I know I do. Malware crosses my mind, but it would be a lie to say I do a fully audit of every package I use.

The surprising part for me wasn't that he was installing packages. It was that he just did a super fast search-click-install loop, where many of them had handful of ratings max, some even 3 stars or less. I'm used to checking out the Github repo of the package first, considering how many stars it has, how many releases there have been, etc before adding it to Emacs.

But you bring up a good point. Perhaps installing packages willy nilly is orthogonal to the editor choice.

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