Pros/cons of using a code editor distro vs managing your own plugins (split thread)

Don’t get me wrong, I long for a world in which I could trust software to be well-built and do what it says on the box without betraying the user at every turn. I can still (barely) remember when that was the world we lived in!

I really wish I could use something like Zed and not have to deal with spending a week learning to configure my text editor, but the thing about VC tech products is that it’s not a matter of if they will betray you but when. And unsurprisingly they’ve already pivoted from “fast text editor with GPU rendering” to “this baby can fit so much AI in it”.

For the record I have hardly touched my nvim config in ages and it still gets the job done every day. I’ll have to write a blog post on how to set it up since we clearly do not have enough of those!

Exactly. I loved the idea but when I saw what people are behind it, nope, sorry but just nope. Their playbook is the same every time: offer a very compelling 100% free product, build up a critical mass and then people’s sunk cost fallacy kicks in – they will not leave and will start defending the questionable practices… “who cares about telemetry, it helps them improve the product”, “AI is entirely local, it’s a pretrained model” (and it’s not, it’s just making network API calls), to my favorite “they have to make money somehow” while turning a completely blind eye to the “how”, which is usually shady as hell.

For the record, I probably would pay something like 50-60 EUR a year for AstroNvim or something similar. But companies like JetBrains completely overdid it… their individual plans begin at 170 EUR! And you are locked to their ecosystem. Yeah no, thanks.

You do understand that’s hugely subjective, right. Technically you can never touch notepad and it would still get the job done. I use AstroNvim because people constantly improve its speed, visual styling, and general utility. Things I simply don’t have the time, energy and motivation to do.

There has only been one case when I was not okay with their defaults. I got pissed but commandeered some patience and fixed it in 20-30 minutes (and I hate to admit it but emerged enlightened about how the really good package manager for Neovim – called lazy – works).

Aha, the funniest bit I saw was when they announced their “own” “open source” completion model, which of course was literally just Qwen fine tuned on something like 400 FIM examples. Which would actually be pretty cool if it ran locally (it’s a 7B model!), but instead of course it sends everything straight to the “cloud” by default. Missed opportunity!

I suppose - I’m definitely not telling anyone what to use! I just thought I’d mention that I’m personally happier without a distro.

In my case this is exactly what I’m trying to avoid. The last time I had to update my nvim config was when they shipped a new default colorscheme and it totally broke my Elixir syntax highlighting (way too many things were the same color).

Of course if I wanted to improve general utility I would add more plugins - but I’m usually just fine!

Put catpuccin in your list of plugins that AstroNvim will automatically manage, add one Lua line activating it, done.

I get it, dude, not judging, just don’t make it sound like it’s a nuclear science. AstroNvim won me over because it has a lot of goodies BUT it’s very configurable, and rather easily too.

Maybe I was not clear: it was neovim that updated the default theme and broke my config! My point being: I do not want anyone changing my theme I switched to another (built-in) theme and I am just fine.

My point about plugins is not that they’re hard to manage (the distros make it easy) but that I am very avoidant of dependencies in general. For example there was a prominent GH action compromised quite badly just in the past week. This is why I use Elixir instead of JS - far fewer deps to worry about, and if anything is missing I get to make my own, which I enjoy!

Yeah I get that and I follow the news but at this point I just can’t get more worried than I already am. Modern IT is a huge mess, many people allowed it and it’s not my fault so let them suffer.

But I don’t think we should get as paranoid though. Still, personal choices. Cheers.

The worst trend in software and tech has been aggressively stripping users of the right to make choices about their own devices. In that context, it is wonderful that we can both choose to use nvim so differently without issues

Oh I’d take it much further if I could but we don’t have any other meaningful choice outside Windows, Linux and macOS.

Yeah, that’s why I will go back to Linux sooner rather than later. I don’t want to wake up to my Mac telling me 10 more things I can’t do with the device I bought with money I worked fair and square for.

Haiku OS might be another option but again, no patience for tinkering lately. We’ll see.

The War on General Purpose Computation

Tools like Neovim and Linux are a sort of miracle.

Ollama, Huggingface and SimpleX - beautiful new tools.

If we only had options in mobile phones…

Not to be elitist ahole or to brag but me and many of my acquaintances were seeing it clearly as far back as in 2003. It was extremely obvious that the corps will feign being friends with us and then try to take over.

And thousands of small steps from them over the years have proven it.

But privileged programmers and other techies preferred to invent their 2946th LISP interpreter and blabber about boring computing problems that have zero relevance to almost anything out there and not avoid this now almost inevitable state of affairs as of today.

And then they go to HN and post crap like “What can we do about this?”…

They are naive like puppies.

Yeah, we don’t. But Android is pretty hackable. Though to be honest, me having a well-curated PiHole probably solves 90% of all problems with Android, I would bet.