Comment by simoesd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simoesd | Hacker News Reader

I know the article is mostly about making stand-alone software, but this type of thing is why one of the things I value most when looking workflow tools I will be using heavily is extensibility. I can try put someone's neovim plugin for a second, figure out if it's something I actually need, and if so make my own personal version that matches my mental model perfectly, adds all the dumb little bells I want, and removes all the useful features I don't personally care about. Plus I no longer need to worry nearly as much about supply chain issues.

Over the years I've replaced 90% of the plugins I used when I started. Plus I get a nice outlet from any pesky NIH symptoms.

I'm the same.

In all honesty, when you start up emacs for the first time with a blank config, it looks terrible. But then you start building it up with plugins and adding code to support your own quirky workflows and slowly it becomes too powerful in your life to ignore. I have not been able to drop it for 13 straight years. With AI taking over the development experience, emacs and neovim have only become even better, because now you can get AI to bake your custom workflows into the config for you.

Emacs/neovim should be the gold standard for all workflow tools.

I did the same. I started with Doom Emacs and then a year later decided to start from scratch and build the computing environment I wanted. But I think the experience of Doom showed me what was possible, what I liked, and what I really had no need for.

I make small config changes every day and its super fun to use my computer this way. I wish everything was configurable like Emacs.

It is! That's the post!

I'm currently polishing one of my packages for publication, and for that do a lot of testing in a vanilla Emacs. It's shocking how many of even (to me) absolute core functionality is actually customization I did a decade or two ago, and then forgot about.

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