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> It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations Is it? The vast majority of the time, I change settings/set things up the way I want, and then... le

by squigz 2y ago

> It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations Is it? The vast majority of the time, I change settings/set things up the way I want, and then... leave them for literally years. Hell, I can directly restore a backup I have of Sublime Text from years ago and my customizations will work.

optymizer 2y ago
It is. I used to customize everything. On Windows 95/98/2000/XP - custom cursors, themes, icon packs, custom Windows loading screen, the works. When I used KDE (and Gnome for a while) and compiz came out, I enjoyed flaming windows. Same story - custom icon packs, make grub menu look nice, hell, custom kernels compiled for my CPU, etc. Somewhere along the way I lost interest in customizing the OS. These days I routinely switch between MacOS, Windows and various Linux flavors on lots of computers. The only thing I may customize is I write my .vimrc from memory. On my Android phones, I change the wallpaper and I disable animations. Otherwise, stock everything. Now that I think about it, it can't be the time saved, surely I waste more time on HN. It likely correlates more with using computers for work as opposed to for fun and learning. Even the learning I do these days is rather stressful - if I can steal an hour or two on the weekend, I feel lucky, so spending time to customize the environment seems like a waste. Maybe if life slows down, I'll find joy in customizing my OSes again.
- Larrikin 2y ago
  Eh, I find a computer not customized to my work flow to be a waste of time. The amount of time I spend using someone else's computer is such a small amount of time.
- 90s_dev 2y ago
  Yes, I have the same history customizing everything! From Windows 3.11 to XP to Linux, and then giving up because life gets busy. On the note of programming not being fun anymore, that's exactly why I'm making my secret project that I hope to release very very soon, maybe in a week or so. I want to make programming fun again, in a similar way that pico8 did, but x100.
  - squigz 2y ago
    > It is. I used to customize everything. On Windows 95/98/2000/XP - custom cursors, themes, icon packs, custom Windows loading screen, the works. > I have the same history customizing everything! ... then giving up because life gets busy. I think this might be why some people have such different experiences. I don't try to customize "everything" - just what needs to be. Like, yeah, I would expect it to be difficult to maintain random Explorer customizations. I would not expect it to be difficult to maintain customization for a popular IDE.
    - progmetaldev 2y ago
      I am with you, customizing your daily tools and saving those configurations is far different from customizing every visual element of your operating system. Being able to reproduce your environment is definitely a worthy goal, but at the same time, I think you'd be limiting yourself by not configuring your production software to your own liking/most-efficient way you work.
      - 3036e4 2y ago
        One of the few things I do bother to configure is my window manager, but only because it happens to be well designed and make it easy to store all configuration in my config git repo. Too much software put host-specific stuff in settings files (like absolute paths) or just are not stable enough in general that it is worth trying to maintain a portable configuration.
90s_dev 2y ago
Most of the time, yes. I maintained my vimrc for maybe 10-15 years before I gave up on it. The hard part of maintaining a config is that there's no such thing as cost-free usage, it always takes a mental toll to change a config, to learn a new config, to remember which configs are in use and what they do, to backup configs, or at least to setup and maintain a config-auto-backup flow. By far, the easiest mental model is just learning how everything works out of the box, and getting used to it. Then again, sometimes what people want is to do things the hard way for its own sake. That's probably part of why I kept going back to C over and over for so many years.
- 3036e4 2y ago
  I don't know vim well. Why is it not easy to just keep using the same settings? The oldest parts of my emacs config go back at least 30 years and I have had it in a git repo for ~15. I keep my entire .emacs.d versioned, including all third-party packages I depend on (so no fetching of anything from the cloud). Have had to do at most minimal changes when upgrading to newer versions and with some tiny amount of work the same config still works for emacs from around version 21 to 31 (but features are of course missing in older versions).
  - Izkata 2y ago
    The same is true of vim. They're talking about effort changing it and keeping it around across computers. I don't think I've really changed my vimrc for 5-10 years.
- aftbit 2y ago
  Except then when I type ":Wq" by mistake, I get an error instead of vim doing what I expect. This happens about 20 times a day for me. One line of config maintenance is well worth the end of this daily annoyance.
  - Teckla 2y ago
    ZZ will save the file (if there are changes) and quit. Try it as an alternative to :wq.

by squigz 2y ago

optymizer 2y ago

It is. I used to customize everything. On Windows 95/98/2000/XP - custom cursors, themes, icon packs, custom Windows loading screen, the works. When I used KDE (and Gnome for a while) and compiz came out, I enjoyed flaming windows. Same story - custom icon packs, make grub menu look nice, hell, custom kernels compiled for my CPU, etc. Somewhere along the way I lost interest in customizing the OS. These days I routinely switch between MacOS, Windows and various Linux flavors on lots of computers. The only thing I may customize is I write my .vimrc from memory. On my Android phones, I change the wallpaper and I disable animations. Otherwise, stock everything. Now that I think about it, it can't be the time saved, surely I waste more time on HN. It likely correlates more with using computers for work as opposed to for fun and learning. Even the learning I do these days is rather stressful - if I can steal an hour or two on the weekend, I feel lucky, so spending time to customize the environment seems like a waste. Maybe if life slows down, I'll find joy in customizing my OSes again.

Larrikin 2y ago
Eh, I find a computer not customized to my work flow to be a waste of time. The amount of time I spend using someone else's computer is such a small amount of time.
90s_dev 2y ago
Yes, I have the same history customizing everything! From Windows 3.11 to XP to Linux, and then giving up because life gets busy. On the note of programming not being fun anymore, that's exactly why I'm making my secret project that I hope to release very very soon, maybe in a week or so. I want to make programming fun again, in a similar way that pico8 did, but x100.
- squigz 2y ago
  > It is. I used to customize everything. On Windows 95/98/2000/XP - custom cursors, themes, icon packs, custom Windows loading screen, the works. > I have the same history customizing everything! ... then giving up because life gets busy. I think this might be why some people have such different experiences. I don't try to customize "everything" - just what needs to be. Like, yeah, I would expect it to be difficult to maintain random Explorer customizations. I would not expect it to be difficult to maintain customization for a popular IDE.
  - progmetaldev 2y ago
    I am with you, customizing your daily tools and saving those configurations is far different from customizing every visual element of your operating system. Being able to reproduce your environment is definitely a worthy goal, but at the same time, I think you'd be limiting yourself by not configuring your production software to your own liking/most-efficient way you work.
    - 3036e4 2y ago
      One of the few things I do bother to configure is my window manager, but only because it happens to be well designed and make it easy to store all configuration in my config git repo. Too much software put host-specific stuff in settings files (like absolute paths) or just are not stable enough in general that it is worth trying to maintain a portable configuration.

90s_dev 2y ago

Most of the time, yes. I maintained my vimrc for maybe 10-15 years before I gave up on it. The hard part of maintaining a config is that there's no such thing as cost-free usage, it always takes a mental toll to change a config, to learn a new config, to remember which configs are in use and what they do, to backup configs, or at least to setup and maintain a config-auto-backup flow. By far, the easiest mental model is just learning how everything works out of the box, and getting used to it. Then again, sometimes what people want is to do things the hard way for its own sake. That's probably part of why I kept going back to C over and over for so many years.

3036e4 2y ago
I don't know vim well. Why is it not easy to just keep using the same settings? The oldest parts of my emacs config go back at least 30 years and I have had it in a git repo for ~15. I keep my entire .emacs.d versioned, including all third-party packages I depend on (so no fetching of anything from the cloud). Have had to do at most minimal changes when upgrading to newer versions and with some tiny amount of work the same config still works for emacs from around version 21 to 31 (but features are of course missing in older versions).
- Izkata 2y ago
  The same is true of vim. They're talking about effort changing it and keeping it around across computers. I don't think I've really changed my vimrc for 5-10 years.
aftbit 2y ago
Except then when I type ":Wq" by mistake, I get an error instead of vim doing what I expect. This happens about 20 times a day for me. One line of config maintenance is well worth the end of this daily annoyance.
- Teckla 2y ago
  ZZ will save the file (if there are changes) and quit. Try it as an alternative to :wq.