This looks kinda cool. Thank you for tagging/pinging me! I'll take a look and perhaps bother you (or others) at a later moment with questions 😅.

Makes a lot of sense.

Thank you so much for chiming in and sharing your knowledge and experiences! Much appreciated!

Thanks a lot for sharing your insights and experiences on this! Kickstart.nvim has surely caught my interest and I would like to play with it to see how much I can make it resemble LunarVim and the others in functionality and if there's anything worthwhile that remains to be missing. If not, then perhaps I'll be relying on Kickstart.nvim instead. Once again; thank you!

With the amount of different distros you've tried (though mostly derivatives of Arch/Debian), I'm actually surprised to see that you haven't used any derivative of Fedora. Is there any reason in particular?

and without all your configs it is a very different beast of an editor anyway and something you will need to get used to everytime you jump on the server.

Good point.

If you can install stuff to your home drive then it is quite easy to get helix running - it is a single binary with some language assets (requires one env var to point to them). So is trivial to get working from your home dir without a package manager.

I'm impressed. Thank you for pointing this out.

Ideally with things like ansible you should not need an editor on it at all.

Hmm..., honestly, I haven't yet done a lot of things with Ansible yet. Perhaps it's time to go explore that rabbit hole as well 🤣. Thank you (once more) for pointing this out!

Do you mean vi input mode in other editors?

Yes.

Your input has been much appreciated! Thank you!

Emacs I’m not so sure. If you’ve checked the news anytime for Doom Emacs, you can see the maintainer mentioning how it’s become progressively difficult to maintain the project. I’d imagine it’s a similar story for plugins and other derivatives. People have attempted remaking Emacs from scratch, but there was not enough momentum for it, so that went under.

This is news to me. Thank you so much for mentioning this! I'll have to look into this.

Have you had a look at the design philosophy behind Kakoune?

I actually hadn't yet, but I did just now. And I'd have to say that I liked what I read. There's for sure a lot out there that's worthy of being explored and I've become confident that Kakoune deserves to be further explored as well. Thank you for informing me on that!

I also recommend reading this article here that goes more in-depth on this point and has a comparison of vim, helix and kakoune.

I haven't read the article yet. But I'm pretty sure it's going to be another excellent read. Please feel free to share more from where these are coming from 😊! Thank you!

I've indeed been pleasantly surprised by Helix since I've started these posts. I'm also more optimistic than initially regarding its future prospects. I'll look into it and perhaps I'll have some use for it. Thank you!

My impression about VS Code being popular is also from workplaces at several companies, VS Code was literally on every machine and VS Code project config files are nowadays checked in with project into version control. (In the past I would not have been happy about config files in version control, but I just accepted it by now.)

That's actually kinda concerning 😅. I hope I can remain free to use whichever IDE suits me best. But thanks for pointing that out as it's a very realistic scenario.

How to setup VIM/NEOVIM or EMACS as a descent C# IDE?

Hehe, the crux. Honestly, I'm not very optimistic that it can do everything one might be used to do on something like Jetbrains' Rider. Nonetheless, I'll try to get it as close as I can and see from there if I'm willing to deal with it. I'm not entirely opposed to rely on other IDEs from time to time for specific functionality I'd be missing otherwise.

It’s unfortunate that nothing really has Kakoune bindings other than Kakoune.

That's indeed very unfortunate...

And after you type the ‘2w’, the selection shows what you’re about to delete, because it’s a separate command.

That genuinely seems like very useful functionality. Thanks for pointing that out!

Sure, you can use visual mode in vim but it feels like an afterthought in a lot of ways.

Could you perhaps give some examples so that I can better understand/grasp why you feel that's the case?

Those two are I think the main reasons I like Kakoune.

I haven’t really had problems with it, at least. Maybe because I’ve used vim for a long time before Kakoune. TBH I also don’t really use vim a lot anymore except on one remote machine that isn’t mine.

I am very grateful to you for sharing your experiences as a long time Vim user that currently prefers Kakoune over it. It has definitely impressed me and made me a lot more curious towards it. And I genuinely feel like I should think this over properly before I rashly commit to Vi(m). Thank you for raising such awareness!

I’m not using lsp in Neovim so if I need lsp I’ll just pull out emacs. If I’m already in the terminal I’ll usually pull out Neovim to edit a file, but if I’m writing like markdown or something that uses images I like the ability to display images inline in emacs. LaTeX is always something I do in emacs because there’s a built in pdf viewer in emacs and there’s built in spell check also. In the terminal in emacs, sometimes I open up Neovim to do a quick edit because of muscle memory from the terminal. One thing that’s really cool about Neovim is that you can embed it in other applications, so if I really have to use an ide that’s not emacs, I’ll just do that.

Wow, the insights! *Vehemently noting these down somewhere* Heck, I think you've cracked the code. Since I've created these posts, I became more and more aware of how great both Emacs and (Neo)Vim are. And while I was already flirting with the idea to perhaps use both, I think you've just completely obliterated any other option; which is a good thing. As such, I'm actually grasping for words that would somehow be able to properly convey the feelings of gratitude I currently experience. For whatever it's worth; thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Yeah there’s a thing called EAF, which allows python and javascript to be embedded in emacs. It allows for more complex applications to be built in emacs, similar to VSCode. I’m not sure how difficult it is to make something with EAF, but I haven’t really seen any things written in it that aren’t in the EAF organization. I think the future could be EAF or maybe something like EAF to be able to leverage the power of the javascript ecosystem like how VSCode does for a lot of plugins. There have been some attempts to rewrite emacs in different languages, but emacs is too large, and you would lose the old ecosystem by doing that.

Once more; much appreciated!

There’s a larger community around Doom Emacs, and Doom Emacs looks nicer. Honestly though it doesn’t matter that much which one you use since they are both pretty good.

Yet again; I'm grateful! Have a good one! I wish you and your loved ones the best!

• the default editor is kinda shit
• but it is really good at editing it’s configuration language: elisp

So people have a need to change their editor, and a good configuration language to do it in. Moreover, emacs secretly comes with a bunch of built-in features, not enabled by default. It also helps that emacs is not terminal-based, allowing users to do stuff in emacs that you aren’t able to do in a normal terminal (like viewing images, or searching for images on the web. Did I already say that emacs has a built-in (primitive) web browser?) and generally means that emacs users “live” in emacs, as they already have access to so many features.

That makes so much sense. Would it be fair to say that Neovim attempted with Lua to bridge that gap and also make it a lot more accessible?

Did I already say that emacs has a built-in (primitive) web browser?

I don't think you did, but I'm already aware. I even have some concerns regarding its sandbox 😅. Would you happen to know more regarding this?

I wouldn’t quite say that. It is more that you are probably going to need some prerequisite emacs knowledge to make the best use out of spacemacs’ layer system. To figure out how spacemacs works, you first need to have a basic idea of how emacs works. Doom is a bit closer to the metal, so you need to know less in order to properly customize it

That's some excellent insight! Thank you very much, good human!

I was shocked when I went from “I’ve never used spacemacs before” to “I’m comfortably writing LaTeX here” in about half an hour.

This line really piqued my interest, especially considering that I've had another conversation with someone else in which the general sentiment seemed to be that "Spacemacs expects you to know Emacs, while being a completely different beast of itself.". May I ask how your Spacemacs is configured? Would you say it's close to the default config? Or rather a significant departure? Furthermore, I believe I've read the existence of some kind of version control. Which, at least by the name of it, should somehow contribute to a more stable experience. Or am I perhaps confusing things?

My setup still breaks occasionally and sometimes it’s a bit difficult to figure out why and how to fix it

Does this happen randomly? Or rather as a 'response'?

I like being able to change how the editor works on the fly just by writing some elisp anywhere

This sounds very interesting and promising. Would you mind providing an example of sorts such that I can perhaps better grasp both the sheer amount of new possibilities it provides as well as its (possible) limitations (if at all)?

I like that emacs has been around for decades and will be around for decades more.

I wholeheartedly agree! But, I am at least somewhat concerned when it comes to its 'gravitational pull from afar'. To me at least, it seems as if, currently, Neovim does a better job at attracting new people. Perhaps these are just mostly refugees from Vim. Nonetheless, it can't be ignored (I think). Would you mind sharing your thoughts on this?