Git is simple in its operations, but utterly complex in the stuff you might need to do because the operations aren’t mathematically clean. Things like git rerere should plainly not exist because states which require using it should be impossible to reach. And the likes of vim, or pre-2.8 blender, kinda ended up there as they grew organically, the more you tack on the more likely it is that different things don’t work well with each other. Which is why I recommended helix: It’s a clean-slate redesign. E.g. helix’ command language is consistently <selection><action> while vim is all over the place, you end up learning things by rote instead of really exploiting the combinatorics. On the VCS side darcs is sane in principle but it’s patch theory didn’t really have efficiency in mind and there’s a very nasty complexity explosion you can run into, pijul fixes all that: It has both a vastly superior interface without surprises (such as patches not being associative) and it’s fast.
We’re talking about things I might do a couple of times a month.
The most striking difference between the likes of VSCode and Helix are not things that you do once a month, but stuff that you do all the times: Navigating and basic editing. Within the first couple of pages of going through the tutorial you’ll know if navigating with hjklwWbB etc. is a thing that would save you time, whether it’s worth making the interface modal, having to type i (or various other options) before actually writing text. I certainly still haven’t really gotten my head around Helix’ multiple cursors because I don’t need it that often but VSCode wouldn’t be any faster at those kind of things, either.
I’ll look into LSP on my PC, but I might just forget I have it by the time I try to figure out what to do with it.
Language Server Protocol. Actually started out on VSCode, it’s how language integration works: The compiler writers (or whoever) provide functionality such as “give me docs for a certain identifier”, “rename this identifier” etc. and the editor/IDE simply offers those options, display the docs in-line, etc. It quickly caught on everywhere, 20 years ago you certainly wouldn’t have seen me advocate writing Java in vim because the likes of Eclipse were just way better at wrangling the language, but the times of those language-specific functions not being available in good ole code editors are over.
Tell you what. As I’ve just ended a contract and have some time to work on my side project while I job hunt, I’ll give it a shot for the rest of this month and report back.
Git is simple in its operations, but utterly complex in the stuff you might need to do because the operations aren’t mathematically clean. Things like git rerere should plainly not exist because states which require using it should be impossible to reach. And the likes of vim, or pre-2.8 blender, kinda ended up there as they grew organically, the more you tack on the more likely it is that different things don’t work well with each other. Which is why I recommended helix: It’s a clean-slate redesign. E.g. helix’ command language is consistently <selection><action> while vim is all over the place, you end up learning things by rote instead of really exploiting the combinatorics. On the VCS side darcs is sane in principle but it’s patch theory didn’t really have efficiency in mind and there’s a very nasty complexity explosion you can run into, pijul fixes all that: It has both a vastly superior interface without surprises (such as patches not being associative) and it’s fast.
The most striking difference between the likes of VSCode and Helix are not things that you do once a month, but stuff that you do all the times: Navigating and basic editing. Within the first couple of pages of going through the tutorial you’ll know if navigating with hjklwWbB etc. is a thing that would save you time, whether it’s worth making the interface modal, having to type i (or various other options) before actually writing text. I certainly still haven’t really gotten my head around Helix’ multiple cursors because I don’t need it that often but VSCode wouldn’t be any faster at those kind of things, either.
Language Server Protocol. Actually started out on VSCode, it’s how language integration works: The compiler writers (or whoever) provide functionality such as “give me docs for a certain identifier”, “rename this identifier” etc. and the editor/IDE simply offers those options, display the docs in-line, etc. It quickly caught on everywhere, 20 years ago you certainly wouldn’t have seen me advocate writing Java in vim because the likes of Eclipse were just way better at wrangling the language, but the times of those language-specific functions not being available in good ole code editors are over.
Tell you what. As I’ve just ended a contract and have some time to work on my side project while I job hunt, I’ll give it a shot for the rest of this month and report back.
Blog post! Blog post!