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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

I might HAVE to learn EMacs (prefer over Vim) because I think eventually everything else will be tainted by mandatory AI features and/or subscriptions.

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And Zeds multiplayer features might make it so your workplace mandates Zed if you're unlucky and Zed succeeds with their plan.

Zed is fully open source. Fork it. The code is pretty nice, too, easy to understand.

VSCode is open source, too, but it's been pretty easy for them to keep forks from taking off by having proprietary extensions, a "markeplace", and other lock-in.

All they have to do is only permit official builds to talk to official builds (for security, of course ;-), and forking Zed becomes a lot harder.

I really dislike the dismissive "fork it" response. You do know how much time and work it takes to maintain your own fork of something, right? It's great that it's possible, but to expect most people to do something like that is absurd.

I would be willing to use a very old version of neovim or sublime text with only bugfixes.

Not sure how many people would use that though

i do know how hard it is, that doesn’t change anything. nobody is forced to use something like zed and if you think it’s important enough to stress about the product decisions they make, the open source license gives you freedom to decide what to do about it. anyway you don’t even have to maintain it. you can take gpl software you like today, build it for linux and with a docker container you’ll be able run that same binary for the foreseeable future. then you can choose to extend it or not

if you haven't checked neovim out, the Lua based config is really nice and easy to grok these days. 10x better than classic vimscript!

A year or two ago I moved away from one of the neovim distros when they randomly changed all the keybinds on an upgrade (such things really anger me) and set up my own config. Funnily enough, I preferred vimscript. I still do use lua of course for various things, but those just go in lua EOF blocks in the vimscript. Vimscript is really terse and convenient for many things, I love it.

I’ve always maintained my own configs for (neo)vim. The only area where I prefer vimscript is with certain incantations for which there are no lua-based alternatives. And those are increasingly rare.

Authoring plugins is a lot more attractive in lua, imho.

You can try Helix editor, it is super underrated editor. I always wanted to go down the vim/nvim path but just couldn't stick to it, especially with nvim. Helix configuration is straightforward have some pretty nice built-ins and it is the fastest/snappiest editor I have used so far.

Nothing against emacs, but check out NeoVIM. If you like Emacs, you might like NeoVIM and its powerful extensibility features.

What makes NeoVIM emacs-like?

It's not emacs-like. But a lot of plugins wants to adopt the emacs philosophy of having it open for the duration of your login session. Instead of the quick edit and be done of standard Vim.

Eventually you will need a text editor with your emacs :)

I hate to break it to you, but emacs was a product of the MIT AI lab.(prep.ai.mit.edu anyone?).

classical AI and modern generative AI are VERY different beasts. also, there isn't any AI in emacs itself. It was a tool built to make a job easier.

That’s fine as long as they don’t force AI prompts to me.

To clarify, I use AI agents, but I absolutely hate them submitting code in my editor. Chatting is fair enough and useful, but I need to turn off the auto-generating code part.

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