Tools Worth Changing to in 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Tools Worth Changing to in 2025

matthewsanabria.dev

11 pointszdw6 comments

I really disliked the call out of the Alacritty maintainer. The license entitles you to fork the repo if you want to package a different icon. It does not entitle you to free labor regardless of your perception of its importance or triviality.

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.

Bought a new Macbook recently and tried most of these. Ghostty seems really good. It _just works_. Helix is pretty cool, also feels like it _just works_ versus something like base nvim (although I'd start with kickstart.nvim). Maybe I should give Fish a go.

Zed's pretty much fully replaced VSCode on my Macbook, but that's not new, it's been my daily driver for months.

An honorable mention from me is Zellij. Feels a lot more user friendly to beginners than tmux.

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 liked Helix for a bit until I really gave neovim a fair chance. The main reason I considered Helix is because nvim's LSP support wasn't very beginner-friendly. It's pretty much stable now and I know enough to set it up manually without Mason.

On top of that, Helix's formatter kept adding a newline to all my PHP files. There was no way to turn it off at the time.

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.

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