achyudh

Do you have a link to this ‘Fearware’ channel? I’ve only heard of nonguix.

Mailing lists essentially solve this by introducing friction: only those who genuinely care about the project will bother to git send-email and defend a patch over an email thread. The incentive for low-quality drive-by submissions also evaporates as there is no profile page with green squares to farm. The downside is that it potentially reduces the number of contributors by making it a lot harder for new contributors to onboard.

I was more familiar with Vim bindings and relied on Vim emulation layers in various IDEs before I moved to Emacs. Evil mode and Doom made the jump possible without sacrificing too much productivity. With Evil, I didn't have to retrain my muscle memory and with Doom I didn't have to cobble together a functional config from scratch.

After a couple of months of using Doom, I felt comfortable enough to roll my own config which also helped me better understand how things worked at a lower level. More interestingly, after a couple of years, I transitioned from Evil to standard Emacs bindings as that felt better integrated with the rest of Emacs.

This pivot sounds like VS Code is moving from a text editor to a thin client for AI services that Microsoft wants to push. It is one more step towards a future where our development tools (just like everything else on our computers these days) are just thin clients/wrappers around SaaS.

Emacs remains the antidote to this. I use Emacs because I want to remain the architect of my development environment, not become the consumer of a telemetry-gathering platform architected by PMs at a big tech company. It is also an absolute joy to use an environment that provides you with the same amount of power as the core maintainers, allowing you to fully inspect and modify the system even while it is running.