Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Realistically, there are a much larger set of things that I don't mind forking these days. It is quite a bit of effort to get to a set of things that mostly don't have bugs, but in the past I might fork a few things[0] but these days, I vendor everything, and some things I just look at the feature list and have Claude rebuild it for me. So I totally understand why actual project maintainers and authors wouldn't want input. I, as a user, am not super eager to buy in to the actual maintainers' future work. It would be super surprising that they want to buy into strangers' work.

0: I liked BurntSushi's Rust projects since they are super easy to edit because they're well architected and fast by default. Easy to write in.

I'm currently running on a fork of Helix text editor, which I heavily gutted to replace the block cursor with a beam-style (like one in insert mode, but just all the time). Since the maintainers are drowning in PRs (472 open ATM), I understandably don't expect them to have time for my weird ideas. Then I pile on top whatever PRs I want that I find useful out of these 472, and with a little bit of LLM help I have a very different text editor than the upstream.

That's exactly the same viewpoint I have.

How do you like Helix as a starting point? Currently, I'm having Claude write a little personal text editor with CodeEditTextView as a starting point and now that I saw your comment I suddenly realized I mostly like using a modal editor and only didn't do it here because I'm moving from a webpage (where Vimium style stuff never appealed to me). Good hint that. I wonder if neovim's server mode will be helpful to me.

From UX perspective modal editing is all I care about and I just got used to Helix. And it's very feature complete and relatively stable, so hacking it and maintaining bunch of patches is not a lot of churn in practice.

I do exactly that also, like ten thousand of other emacs users. We can customize our editor with a proper language, no need for forks.

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