Give Helix a try. It comes with everything you are asking for built in, plus discovery for the commands, plus a selection first approach so you can see what you’re doing.

Any used Thinkpad will work well for you, just search eBay with your price cap and screen size.

Surprisingly, no, hackability isn’t high on my list. Sure it’s nice, but I tend to value good defaults and simple configuration more than creating a super bespoke system that only works for me. With Helix if I really needed to extend it there are the shell commands for now and plugins are coming soon. But I haven’t really felt the need to. 🤷‍♂️

I do agree that VS Codes remote is fantastic and I wish that there was something as good as it more generally. I do see a proposal for adding it to Helix based on the distant library. That might become my first PR for helix.

For me, the killer feature is the consistent selection->action grammar followed by the discoverability features. Being able to see what I am doing before I do it works much better for me and having those little pop ups for the space and g menus mean that I learned the bindings so much faster and use more of them that I ever did for either emacs or vim.

I have used many ides and editors over the years, including nano, emacs, vi, Notepad++, CodeWarrior, JetBrains, Code Composer, MPLAB, Cider, VS Code, and now Helix.

I’ve found that the most important things for me to be productive are:

• UI speed. Lag in the UI is a constant friction that just eats away at you.
• Fast fuzzy search for files, names, definitions, and references. The larger the codebase, the more important this is.
• Good keyboard controls for everything with sane, discoverable bindings. Digging into a menu to do something or having hesitation about hitting a key because I’m not sure what it will do is a huge time suck. It’s not about the time it takes to move the mouse, but the context switch from typing to looking for how to do something.
• Good out of the box experience. I don’t want to have to spend hours or days rebuilding my setup if I’m on a new machine and can’t bring over my stuff for some reason. Sure, I want to be able to adjust things to my liking but a clean setup should be good enough to be productive. And bringing over my setup shouldn’t be more difficult than copying over a zipped directory.
• Really good multi language syntax support, tree parsing, highlighting, etc.

Currently for me Helix is winning on all of the fronts. Cider was surprisingly great, particularly at search, but isn’t available to us plebs, VS Code is ok, emacs and vi can get there but have terrible out of the box and discoverability issues. The others have major problems with multiple criteria.

1. Yes, Helix is a fully keyboard based editor. It does have some minor mouse support available but it is an afterthought.
2. Nope! While the key map of Helix is fully configurable and by default similar to vi, it uses a select-verb grammar instead of a verb-select grammar.

I don’t use AI when I’m learning a new system, framework or language because I won’t actually learn it.

I don’t use AI when I need to make a small change on a system I know well, because I can make it just as fast and have better insight into how it all works.

I don’t use AI when I’m developing a new system because I want to understand how it works and writing the code helps me refine my ideas.

I don’t use AI when I’m working on something with security or copyright concerns.

Basically, the only time I use AI is when I’m making a quick throw away script in a language I’m not fluent in.

As it turns out, none of the services I run from my living room NAS or the one that I have hosted on a dedicated machine elsewhere had an issue.

Trader Joe’s registers run Suse.

Having recently moved into a house with these issues: doorknobs. You never, ever think about the ones that just work well, but every iffy one is irritating every time you use it.

I’m pretty certain at this point that I’m about to be forced to buy some programming socks.

I kinda love it in winter mornings when I’m a bit chilly and then I kick off a big compile or play something and there is this lovely warmth flowing from my main desktop and then I make a big cup of chai.

I bought two old Thinkpads on eBay for $20 each. They run Debian + i3 great and have become my daily portable drivers.

Edit: a new battery and ssd did bring the total up to $100 for the pair.

Couldn’t even listen to the first five seconds to hear the full question, huh?

Thats lovely!!

• Sid Meier’s Pirates!
• Centipede
• OutRun
• Spy Hunter

So you’re saying systemd is the emacs of init?

Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success.

I’ve got a smattering of things from over the years. I ported johntheripper to a new os, maintained Perl testing on it as well for a while. I’ve done some language translation for a few projects, and am starting on some more. I also have some commits to ROS from when I worked at a company that used it. I have inspired a few improvements to Python, though someone else took my initial approach and made a better version that was committed.

Look at this rich guy who’s thinkpad is only 11 years old and has 8GB of RAM. Must be real nice to have been born with a silver spoon.

😉