My cat would disagree. She was very upset when I replaced her favorite warm perch with a flat screen.

Why not both?

Go on…

Big feelings buddy, big feelings.

Wait, people can’t visualize the amount of electricity used for something? Oh, right, not everyone is an electrical engineer.

Instructions unclear, goto considered harmful.

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.

Fucking steam web helper. I’ll have locked my desktop machine and switched my KVM to my work laptop when suddenly the fans spin up. I switch back over and it’s multiple steam processes each using a full core. WTF?!? I’m looking up how to have the lock screen also ‘kill all -9 steam’ to keep it from happening.

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.

Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success.