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Tinkering is the ultimate satisfaction of a hacker. When you love perfecting your tools, shaping your terminal, your Emacs, your Neovim, or whatever tool you us

Tinkering is the ultimate satisfaction of a hacker. When you love perfecting your tools, shaping your terminal, your Emacs, your Neovim, or whatever tool you use, exactly the way you want it. You spend hours doing it and feel enormous satisfaction from every small improvement. That is exactly what a Japanese swordsmith, a chef, or a craftsman does. Perfecting their work, finding joy in refinement, and taking pride in the process itself. I used to see tinkering as a form of procrastination. But not anymore. What does that even mean? That we should be doing something else, and devalue this activity? What if this very activity, and the results it produces, bring me deep satisfaction? In that case, it is not procrastination. It is the perfection of the art.

Johanx64 1y ago
This is not what a Japanese swordsmith or any craftman does, they obsess over the end result, polishing it until it reaches perfection. Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will. If it did, world would be full of polished, high quality software, what instead we have is endless sea of garbage produced by these cough, cough "craftsmen" - that obsess about everything else, but the actual end product.
- submeta 1y ago
  Well, very valid points you made. I must admit. Edit: But why do you believe that my super polished and streamlined WezTerm is less worth than a japanese sword? :) Which value has a perfectly made sword in a world today? Which value has a perfecly made machs tea? And other things only the maker or a few select people value?
  - Johanx64 1y ago
    > why do you believe that my super polished and streamlined WezTerm is less worth than a japanese sword? Because people are willing to pay roughly 0$ for your riced terminal and dot files. A polished japanese sword made by a master craftsmen on the other hand - people are willing to pay good money for.
    - submeta 1y ago
      So you think money is the indicator? I have to disappoint you: There's a ton of things that have zero monteray value, yet an enourmous value for the person who creates it. One example: Open source software. Another: Art you create for the fun of it.
      - Johanx64 1y ago
        I'm sorry to disappoint you. Money is proxy for value. Or atleast the closest thing to it. In fact, it has so much value, that people will bend over, creep and crawl just to get it. And sell their waking hours for it. Yes, you can have a lucky-pet-rock that you've always had with you, that holds value for anyone but you. For everyone else though - it's just a rock.
- iLemming 1y ago
  > Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will. Hmm... excuse me? Linux kernel - most contributors use vim/emacs extensively, with some deep customizations. Git - Linus developed it in his own heavily customized Emacs fork Rust - Core team members use various customized setups Postres - core devs use vim/emacs Kubernetes - vim/emacs What the fuck are you even talking about? Majority of high quality shit we use today - probably 90% of all C - from networking stacks - nginx, HAPoxy, OpenSSL, drivers; to compilers and languages; databases; web infra; cryptography; build systems, basically everything written before ~2010 that's still critical infrastructure was likely built by developers in vim/emacs. All that stuff was developed by those craftsmen you're so dismissively mocking. Do you think they never customized their environments? Spending weeks perfecting configs instead of shipping is a discipline problem, not a tool problem.
  - Johanx64 1y ago
    "Most is software is written using a some text editor." What an astute fucking observation you've made, mate! And so it happens, that webdevs and web infra people (which is the extent of your understanding of "high quality shit") tend to use unixes and consequently vim/emacs as their text editor. No fucking way! Perhaps, you can even tell just by looking at a piece of code - oh, this is beautiful, clean and clear, bugfree, this surely must have been written vim OR emacs? Or maybe, just maybe, you're just making shit up on the spot and thinking backwards and attributing software quality metrics and outcomes to choice of a fucking text editor and how riced it is.
    - iLemming 1y ago
      I'm not making shit up on the spot nor am I attributing any metrics to vim or emacs specifically or how riced should they be, I'm simply telling you the facts to counter-argue your point of: "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will". Most software is not written using "some" text editor, I would love to see maniacs writing kernel patches in notepad.exe or nano. Tools are tools - disputing that vim or emacs are not great tools is plainly dumb, obviously there must be something about them for why they've remained a popular choice among highly skilled pros for decades. Of course, simply picking up a tool isn't enough - I can perfectly write shitty code equally well in Emacs, InteliJ or VSCode, yet saying good stuff never ever got done there is just disingenuous - it was, it is, and it will be. Of course, ricing the editor and terminal doesn't guarantee amazing shit, but the opposite is also equally true - you can't magically build some awesome sauce by paying for proprietary, sophisticated IDE that "just works" either.

Johanx64 1y ago

This is not what a Japanese swordsmith or any craftman does, they obsess over the end result, polishing it until it reaches perfection. Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will. If it did, world would be full of polished, high quality software, what instead we have is endless sea of garbage produced by these cough, cough "craftsmen" - that obsess about everything else, but the actual end product.

submeta 1y ago
Well, very valid points you made. I must admit. Edit: But why do you believe that my super polished and streamlined WezTerm is less worth than a japanese sword? :) Which value has a perfectly made sword in a world today? Which value has a perfecly made machs tea? And other things only the maker or a few select people value?
- Johanx64 1y ago
  > why do you believe that my super polished and streamlined WezTerm is less worth than a japanese sword? Because people are willing to pay roughly 0$ for your riced terminal and dot files. A polished japanese sword made by a master craftsmen on the other hand - people are willing to pay good money for.
  - submeta 1y ago
    So you think money is the indicator? I have to disappoint you: There's a ton of things that have zero monteray value, yet an enourmous value for the person who creates it. One example: Open source software. Another: Art you create for the fun of it.
    - Johanx64 1y ago
      I'm sorry to disappoint you. Money is proxy for value. Or atleast the closest thing to it. In fact, it has so much value, that people will bend over, creep and crawl just to get it. And sell their waking hours for it. Yes, you can have a lucky-pet-rock that you've always had with you, that holds value for anyone but you. For everyone else though - it's just a rock.
iLemming 1y ago
> Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will. Hmm... excuse me? Linux kernel - most contributors use vim/emacs extensively, with some deep customizations. Git - Linus developed it in his own heavily customized Emacs fork Rust - Core team members use various customized setups Postres - core devs use vim/emacs Kubernetes - vim/emacs What the fuck are you even talking about? Majority of high quality shit we use today - probably 90% of all C - from networking stacks - nginx, HAPoxy, OpenSSL, drivers; to compilers and languages; databases; web infra; cryptography; build systems, basically everything written before ~2010 that's still critical infrastructure was likely built by developers in vim/emacs. All that stuff was developed by those craftsmen you're so dismissively mocking. Do you think they never customized their environments? Spending weeks perfecting configs instead of shipping is a discipline problem, not a tool problem.
- Johanx64 1y ago
  "Most is software is written using a some text editor." What an astute fucking observation you've made, mate! And so it happens, that webdevs and web infra people (which is the extent of your understanding of "high quality shit") tend to use unixes and consequently vim/emacs as their text editor. No fucking way! Perhaps, you can even tell just by looking at a piece of code - oh, this is beautiful, clean and clear, bugfree, this surely must have been written vim OR emacs? Or maybe, just maybe, you're just making shit up on the spot and thinking backwards and attributing software quality metrics and outcomes to choice of a fucking text editor and how riced it is.
  - iLemming 1y ago
    I'm not making shit up on the spot nor am I attributing any metrics to vim or emacs specifically or how riced should they be, I'm simply telling you the facts to counter-argue your point of: "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will". Most software is not written using "some" text editor, I would love to see maniacs writing kernel patches in notepad.exe or nano. Tools are tools - disputing that vim or emacs are not great tools is plainly dumb, obviously there must be something about them for why they've remained a popular choice among highly skilled pros for decades. Of course, simply picking up a tool isn't enough - I can perfectly write shitty code equally well in Emacs, InteliJ or VSCode, yet saying good stuff never ever got done there is just disingenuous - it was, it is, and it will be. Of course, ricing the editor and terminal doesn't guarantee amazing shit, but the opposite is also equally true - you can't magically build some awesome sauce by paying for proprietary, sophisticated IDE that "just works" either.