Dark Arc

I’ve mostly just tweaked the configuration and built my own comment formatter/reflow command based on the comment style at work.

It’s almost more about what it doesn’t have for me, because what I’ve run into a lot with trying newer editors is they try and manage the code too much and the code base at work has its own style guide that doesn’t match what the editor tries to do. So the editor might make me slightly more productive … until I find myself fighting with it every 3 lines because of auto formatting or some language server quirk.

I think it’s human nature to “look for a reason” but … these engineered virus narratives have never set well with me. It implies that the only way a pandemic could happen is if some person created it; that’s incredibly self indulgent, “the only way man could die to nature is if man invented nature.”

Viruses just happen; we’ve had a reprieve from major plagues and things and have been unusually healthy because vaccines and other advances in medicine allowed us to save many that would have otherwise died.

The only parts humans are playing in our current health crises are: A) Increasing the number of unvaccinated people giving viruses once nearly killed off room to play again B) Increasing the temperature of the planet which has been demonstrated to increase mutation rates and may release lost viruses trapped in ice and permafrost C) Cutting down large swaths of the Amazon rainforests which may also harbor lost viruses

In all cases, we’re not creating the problem directly, we’re just giving the advantage back to nature that research from recent centuries gave to us.

There is more value in understanding how to extend and customize your editor than in searching for a new one. Use whatever your workplace provides the best support for, and then customize it from there.

I think there’s something to be said for shaking up your environment periodically as well and trying new things. Sure, there’s a week where you edit at a snails pace, followed by a month where you edit a bit slower than normal, but different tools really do have different pros and cons.

For the code bases I’ve worked in, this evolved from necessity as the code files were so large many editors were struggling, the rules for the style so custom that editors can’t be properly configured to match, or the editor performance in general was questionable.

I went through a journey of sorts from IDEs to Electron based editors to Emacs and currently am working with Kakoune (and I’ve passed over a bunch of other editors like Sublime, Helix, and Zed that couldn’t meet my requirements or didn’t match my sensibilities – even though a thing or two here or there really was excellent). Pretty much every change has been the result of the editor pain points that couldn’t be addressed without actually working on the editor itself.

I’ve recently taken to kakoune which was one of the inspirations for Helix.

It’s not as fancy (in terms of built-in features) out of the box, but it’s very performant, integrates with tmux well, and for the C++ and Python I’m writing I haven’t felt the need for much beyond token based word completion and grep.

The client server model it uses has really let me improve my tmux skills because I’m working inside of it more and using it for editor splits.

I don’t know if Helix does this, but I’ve also come to love the pipe operator (where you just pipe a selection into some external program and the selection gets replaced with the output, so you can use the e.g. the sort command to sort text). You can also pretty easily add in custom extensions via command line programs.