Comment by shaokind

I'd like to make some points more explicit about my philosophy.

1. Yes, everything has a maintenance cost. Some choices have less. For instance, electing to choose Todoist instead of org-mode for my todo list means I no longer have to worry about syncing, merge conflicts, or whether the mobile app I've chosen fully conforms to the spec (well, whatever attempt at creating a spec existed at the time).

Of course, I am paying a very literal cost for convenience, and offloading maintenance to the Todoist engineers.

2. Emacs is a cool piece of software, and I am glad others have figured out how to leverage it, in such a way they have a configuration for life. I spent a lot of time marvelling over the set up that Protesilaos had for his writing [0]. It just wasn't for me.

3. For Emacs, if I want to use it like I wanted to, I have a couple of options. Install a package like Doom Emacs, which gives me most of what I want, with a whole lot of cruft I don't. And I have to keep that up-to-date, and worry about random community plugins breaking. Or figure out what set of plugins (after first picking a package manager) to incorporate. Or figure out the Elisp to do it myself. And my writing config would differ from my software engineering config.

No shade on the people who want to do this, but I just... don't? I can use Zed, or VSCode, and I'm 90% of the way there. Install (or configure) the Evil mode equivalent, and I'm happy.

4. One of the smartest engineers I worked with couldn't touch type until about 20 years into his career. The idea that everyone is ricing everything they do, is unrealistic.

[0]: https://protesilaos.com (purely for the emacs, not anything else there)

[1]: https://bphilip.uk/blog/2025-03-09-chase-bank-sync/