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).

Hi all, I’ve moved these posts here as it’s a big enough topic in itself