6 ms·

Reinforcing #1: It's amazing how productive you can be if you're creating things instead of endlessly trying, configuring, and comparing editors.

xcambar 4y ago
Whether you call it over-engineering or procrastination, customizing an editor is a delicious waste of time.
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  I'm certainly not knocking it. I have enjoyed it in the past, particularly with emacs. But it's an activity which some enjoy for its own sake and some don't. It's just not a necessary condition for becoming a 'productive' developer. Those who do enjoy it to the point of writing some of the great open source plugins available, do the rest of us a terrific service.
  - xcambar 4y ago
    Just as you, I certainly don't relate productivity and editor config. My co fig now is really simple: I rely on other's work: I find powerline-10k + LunarVim to make for a more than good enough terminal environment.
saurik 4y ago
I mean, you're going to be programming for the rest of your life, right? I put a bunch of time into customizing vim... god, I think it was 15 years ago? Whenever this comes up, people make it sound like you are somehow going to be doing that every single day for the rest of your life or something... and then, awkwardly, I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantly and slows them down at every turn gloating about how they "saved time" by not spending a small amount of time forever ago to figure out what the hell they actually wanted :/.
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  > I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantly and slows them down at every turn gloating about how they "saved time" by not spending a small amount of time forever ago to figure out what the hell they actually wanted This is just as much a caricature as the one you're objecting to. People do good work using all of the available tools. Some use more than one! There are people who like both emacs and IntelliJ! We really don't have to tribalize over every little choice people make.
  - saurik 4y ago
    I'm totally cool if you want to use IntelliJ. I'm somewhat less cool if you are telling me how awesome IntelliJ is this year after trying to get me to use Eclipse on your last project but are now looking at VSCode as an alternative because you are sick of switching between this stack and Xcode and PyCharm after you stopped just trying to use Sublime for everything... and I certainly lose all sympathy when these same people actively defend this insanity by saying they don't think it makes sense to "waste time" "over-engineering" their text editor setup. Like, if you want to tell me "I use nothing but notepad, and I'm a god at it" I'm going to be "holy hell yeah, I want to feast my eyes upon this marvel"... but, first off, I'm betting at that point you are going to have gotten really good at using notepad, along with all of the little warts of how it interacts with Explorer... and second off, the people who are coming out always to bash on the people who bother to learn and optimize their tools to prepare for a lifetime of software development generally aren't people who simply chose a different tool.
- BossingAround 4y ago
  And then there's the majority of devs, like me, who did not spend months forcing themselves to actually make vim/emacs into an IDE and, at the same time, who suffer from no negative effects with one of those "IDE-of-the-week" (JFYI, that's not a thing). Intellij, Pycharm, and VSCode are all stable and fast. I don't think I've had neither of those crash on me in the past three years. You're laying out a false dichotomy.
  - 4y ago

xcambar 4y ago

Whether you call it over-engineering or procrastination, customizing an editor is a delicious waste of time.

aussiesnack 4y ago
I'm certainly not knocking it. I have enjoyed it in the past, particularly with emacs. But it's an activity which some enjoy for its own sake and some don't. It's just not a necessary condition for becoming a 'productive' developer. Those who do enjoy it to the point of writing some of the great open source plugins available, do the rest of us a terrific service.
- xcambar 4y ago
  Just as you, I certainly don't relate productivity and editor config. My co fig now is really simple: I rely on other's work: I find powerline-10k + LunarVim to make for a more than good enough terminal environment.

saurik 4y ago

I mean, you're going to be programming for the rest of your life, right? I put a bunch of time into customizing vim... god, I think it was 15 years ago? Whenever this comes up, people make it sound like you are somehow going to be doing that every single day for the rest of your life or something... and then, awkwardly, I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantly and slows them down at every turn gloating about how they "saved time" by not spending a small amount of time forever ago to figure out what the hell they actually wanted :/.

aussiesnack 4y ago
> I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantly and slows them down at every turn gloating about how they "saved time" by not spending a small amount of time forever ago to figure out what the hell they actually wanted This is just as much a caricature as the one you're objecting to. People do good work using all of the available tools. Some use more than one! There are people who like both emacs and IntelliJ! We really don't have to tribalize over every little choice people make.
- saurik 4y ago
  I'm totally cool if you want to use IntelliJ. I'm somewhat less cool if you are telling me how awesome IntelliJ is this year after trying to get me to use Eclipse on your last project but are now looking at VSCode as an alternative because you are sick of switching between this stack and Xcode and PyCharm after you stopped just trying to use Sublime for everything... and I certainly lose all sympathy when these same people actively defend this insanity by saying they don't think it makes sense to "waste time" "over-engineering" their text editor setup. Like, if you want to tell me "I use nothing but notepad, and I'm a god at it" I'm going to be "holy hell yeah, I want to feast my eyes upon this marvel"... but, first off, I'm betting at that point you are going to have gotten really good at using notepad, along with all of the little warts of how it interacts with Explorer... and second off, the people who are coming out always to bash on the people who bother to learn and optimize their tools to prepare for a lifetime of software development generally aren't people who simply chose a different tool.
BossingAround 4y ago
And then there's the majority of devs, like me, who did not spend months forcing themselves to actually make vim/emacs into an IDE and, at the same time, who suffer from no negative effects with one of those "IDE-of-the-week" (JFYI, that's not a thing). Intellij, Pycharm, and VSCode are all stable and fast. I don't think I've had neither of those crash on me in the past three years. You're laying out a false dichotomy.
- 4y ago