> years ago instead of continuing this massive collective time waste.

This doesn't seem feasible, because that would go against the culture and long-term practice of doing things. That's why approach of "starting from scratch and doing it right without the baggage" like Helix's works so much better.

If Zed breaks things too much in the future (to the point that its JSON config doesn't let me do something I need to get my work done) I'll probably go back to using Neovim. We'll see how it plays out over time. For now I'm enjoying having less configuration knobs.

i'm used to a plugin- and config-light setup on my personal systems, with most of the customization being stuff like latex compilation and preview from a keybind rather than major changes to default behavior, but the whole "vim needs a bazillion lines of config!" thing isn't really true. some people like to spend a week bikeshedding it but it's by no means necessary. i've had the same vimrc for years and years and basically never need to change it.

Yeah that single line makes me doubt the whole post, how can a format without comments be an upgrade to any configuration file is beyond me. My customized configs were full of ‘this was broken on this day by something else, link to obscure thread’ before I accepted the way of default.

I have Ctrl+` set to switch focus between the editor and the terminal panes in VSCode, so I can toggle between them pretty easily as this is also my workflow

If anyone's wondering, here's what I have in my keybindings.json

    {
        "key": "ctrl+`",
        "command": "workbench.action.terminal.focus"
    },
    {
        "key": "ctrl+`",
        "command": "workbench.action.focusActiveEditorGroup",
        "when": "terminalFocus"
    },

I know people who use ^Z to suspend vim and then foreground it again.

As the author describes though, I found myself copy-pasting a lot between LLM chat and editing buffers. In tmux, I have a really simple function that copies select panes (using tmux capture-pane) into my prompt, or I can give it full files for context. Most of the time though, I can do something like `llm -t 0 -t 1 'what is this libSSL error indicating? here's my code', where -t 0 gives it my vim pane and -t 1 gives it the terminal I'm running things in. I've been surprised that this somewhat rudimentary approach has felt far more effective than the more sophisticated editors I've been trying.

Is this just me? Does it seem to others that the LLM-enabled editors coming out these days still require a lot of copy-pasting of context that can be easily provided with just a dump of tmux output?

Everything-is-just-text might be crude but dang does it make quick and dirty LLM integrations a snap!

Compare that to vim where it's truly an open source product.

because when the very customized setup inevitably breaks the amount of headache you have is roughly proportionate to the amount of customization, whereas software with strong defaults tends to deal with that for you.

This is particularly the case with neovim which, in almost deliberate defiance of any systems thinking, just tends to consist of a few dozen moving parts loosely tied together and you have to sort of pray that updating some doesn't just break things. Paraphrasing Russ Ackhoff, if you take the best part of every car and put it together you don't get the best car, you get something that doesn't even drive, this is how I've felt more than once with very bespoke editor setups

Or, to put it another way: every step you take away from the mainstream has a cost, so you had better know how much you are willing to pay and budget your quirks accordingly.

That's one of the reasons why I chose Vim over Emacs after switching back and forth for a while.

I do prefer the design of Emacs because I prefer having full control over my environment - I even coded more than a couple of tiny, application-specific editors - but sometimes I have better things to do than e.g. reading docs or searching for a plugin/extension mod that does what I need, or do it myself; sometimes I am a mere luser who want things to "just work" out-of-the-box.