Software I use and why

Software I use and why

Warning! Opinions below.

Emacs vs Vim (Vim, Neovim, Vi, Ed, …)

Emacs! That said I’m not an elitist and I don’t believe Emacs is better in any empirical way. I just like the program.

The language

Lisp is a language that I like and seems really cool in theory but outside of Emacs I don’t really have any use for it. I’m writing a quick and dirty ad-hoc program? Python. Writing exploits? C and Python. I want to poke at some API or really any task that is good with dynamic typing? Python. I want to write software with good static typing that is like a pyramid, very solid but maybe a little stiff? Rust. Things that run in the browser? JavaScript. So Emacs fullfils the need of writing Lisp inside of me. Vim has Vimscript which everyone and their mother seems to hate and Lua thanks to Neovim, which I’m not a big fan of either. It’s a fine language but it doesn’t ignite that spark inside of me, you know. I think the idea of representing everything as a table/tree/whatever you wanna call it is clever. I said to myself that I’m not gonna mention the indexing from one because it’s a very surface level thing. And I failed miserably.

Config files

Topic a little related to the languages but not fully. It’s also related to how different plugins/packages in the ecosystem handle configuration. This may say more about myself but when I used Neovim in the past my config always ended up being really messy as all the plugins I used, like LSP support, required me to paste a big bulk of code in the config file. I never felt like I understood all the lines, at least without putting effort into it. In Emacs I somehow ended with a two times smaller config with about the same functionality (is some ways more, in other less). I almost want to say three times but I don’t have the numbers anymore and I don’t want to exaggarate. My config feels more elegant with about the same amount of “care” put into it.

Keybindings

I even prefer the keybindings over Vim! I’m not huge on modal editing like the whole internet seems to be. The constant switching between normal mode and insert mode is very annoying for me. In a way Vim users seem to me like people who use Caps Lock to capitalize their letters instead of the superior shift button. There are the jokes about the Emacs pinky or horrible Emacs’ shortcuts however after rebinding Caps Lock to Ctrl writing is very pleasant.

Plugins/packages

For me plugins in both editors are basically the same. All I need is a LSP client (for which I use Eglot, which is built-in) and Tree-sitter (which is also built-in). The rest is just sugar on top of it. Some people will mention Org-mode or Magit as the Emacs’ killer features but I don’t use them in any way that wouldn’t be possible with some Vim plugins like Vimwiki or lazygit. Honestly I even think that Neovim is overall winning in the plugin race. The editor is more popular, there are many more people writing Lua plugins and reporting bugs than there are Lisp hackers writing Emacs macros.

The bad things about Emacs

• No proper dap-mode. Well there’s the dap-mode package but it requires you to use lsp-mode which I don’t like and I don’t want to be locked in that ecosystem.
• It can be quite slow on some occasions. It feels great for most of the time but there are cases where you can feel the garbage collector. You can feel the gap buffer. You can feel the one thread.
• And some other things you could mention. The community being small. Some dead/junky packages. Startup times. I can’t think of anything else to be honest.

… vs Helix

I like the idea of Helix: having a Vim-like editor with out of the box human experience (and no, I’m not a big fan of Vim/Emacs distributions like Doom Emacs either, but that’s an another topic). I gain nothing from having a huge config file. However I don’t trust the developers and the work being done on Helix is just too slow (which is understandable, this is an open-source project done without much if any profit, yada, yada). There are still some problems with syntax highlighting that haven’t been worked on for years which I consider to be basic as far as using the editor goes. Still no plugin system in sight which I consider essential.

… vs any other editor

At the point of writing this I never really used anything outside of Vim, Emacs and Helix. I used a little bit of IntelliJ IDEA for a uni group project but I wasn’t impressed. When I started learning programming it was Python with the built-in IDLE editor and after that somehow I moved straight to Vim. I prefer to use true FOSS software when I have the choice but if for example a job I’m in will require me to use VSCode for whatever reason I will not complain (probably!). The only editors I despise on an ideological level is anything from JetBrains and alikes for the predatory tactic of selling the same editor multiple times for every language they decide to support. Imagine if Adobe started selling a different program for every file format!

Shell

Firstly I’m not a fan of Zsh because the defaults there are as bad as it is possible to make them. Due to this I used fish in the past but now we have the drawback of having to use a shell language you probably don’t want to touch cuz you won’t see it anywhere else anyway, even if it’s a little better than Bash (especially since I rarely write shell scripts to begin with). That’s why nowadays I mostly use Eshell with Eat as a terminal emulator inside of Emacs. The shell has nice integration with Emacs (duh), it uses the completion package of your choice by default, etc. I also use Bash in the TTY because that’s the default.

DEs vs WMs

Even though I use i3 myself I believe that tiling window managers are hugely overrated for most people’s use-cases (It doesn’t mean they aren’t good! Just that their value is overestimated.) and they only use them because either their favourite internet celebrity uses them or their friend group does so. The reason I use i3 is because I want to have an easily configurable setup, where you have everything in one file you can copy around. I don’t think there’s much speed to be gained from switching windows a little faster. I can’t think of a case where I have more than 3 windows open (Emacs, Firefox and Ghidra) that I want to swap around at the same time. “Alt-tabbing” is more than enough for this. I guess I use Emacs as my terminal multiplexer and if somebody doesn’t want to use tmux then using a tiling window manager might be helpful.

Programming languages

My two main programming languages are Python and Rust. Like I stated above in the Emacs section Python is my goto language for anything where dynamic typing is king. Why not a Lisp? Lisps tend to be a little dead and realistically in the modern world, where programming stopped being like magic and started being more like science, where we poke at different libraries and see what happens, we want our language to be well supported with a lot libraries, cli tools and other stuff. That said overall I really like Python, the only thing that I hate about it is the lack of multistatement lambdas. In theory there’s a Python Lisp dialect, kinda like Clojure but less serious, and it’s a really cool project however just using Python is the more pragmantic choice. When it comes to statically typed languages Rust is my favourite. Everything about it just clicks for me. The ADTs. The pattern matching. The functional-style programming combined with low-level concepts. All of the CLI-centric tooling. The explicitness of the language (compared to C++ which is a very implicit language in a lot of ways. To be precise about what I mean - I don’t talk about implicit type conversions, though that’s part of it, what I mean is stuff more like how we don’t know if something is a “pointer” (reference) by how it’s used until we look at the function signature, all the functions that are implicitly used and created that are hard to predict until you really KNOW the rules, the fact that you can never know for sure if a copy is expensive or not, etc.). Forgive me for getting passionate but I think it’s a lovely language. I also use C, though nowadays more and more rarely. I use it sometimes for exploit dev, when I just need to do some syscalls and call it a day, or when I feel like doing some pointer fuckery. What I like about C is how well it maps to assembly like no other language. I heard once an argument that it’s not true because of all the optimizations and while it might be true in theory, in practice there’s a difference between theory and practice. If you ever tried to reverse engineer compiled programs you know how much easier it is to do so with a C program than with any other language.

For debugging I use gdb and ipdb.

X11 vs Wayland

I have an AMD GPU and I still use X11. I tried using Wayland with Sway and it felt like torturing myself. I’m gonna give Wayland an another try but not in the next few years. So what were my problems? There were some and I’m sure most of them have a fix but as a user I live by the philosophy of the least resistance - I’m gonna use the software that causes the least amount of friction and allows me to focus on what I want to in the current moment. Some examples:

• There was some forced VSync kind of problem. All video games that I wanted to play that are input sensitive were unplayable on Sway. Even though VSync was turned off in the game settings I had huge input lag in osu! and Counter Strike that wasn’t present in X11. Seems like this issue is fixed with the implementation of a tearing protocol but it still isn’t implemented everywhere.
• Fullscreen in video games behaved weirdly.
• Pixelated/blurry (at this point I dont remember to be honest, maybe both depending on the scale) scaling of things that weren’t made for Wayland. I have a 3k display in my laptop so scaling is necessary. It was present for example when using Ghidra.
• Push2talk and screen sharing not working on Discord by default. Not hard to work around it but it’s better when things just work. ;)

And all those problems for what? I heard multiple monitor setups work better on Wayland. Too bad I use only one.

Linux distributions

I don’t have any ‘hot takes’ when It comes Linux distributions. Honestly I’m fine with anything as long as it doesn’t get in my way. I prefer Systemd distros because that’s what I’m used to, it always worked fine and was easy to diagnose with journalctl (some of the arguments against Systemd seem to be bad faith). Currently I’m using Arch, I don’t know why but it’s the only thing that works and if it doesn’t it’s easy to google (duckduckgo it) why. In the past I used Fedora 38 (or was it 37?) on my laptop and Fedora 40 on my desktop PC but there were always some small problems that made me give up on using Fedora as a daily driver. It seems like not a lot of people use Fedora on a desktop, at least I’ve only met one person. For example the PCSX2 package at the time of writing this is by default unsuable beyond a simple launch. First of all it’s a 32-bit package for some reason. Secondly, the SPU2 plugin is not found so we can’t even complete the initial setup. After a little debugging we can see it happens because we don’t have a 32-bit version of libjack.so.0 and the plugin needs it.

[poni@Asuka /usr/lib/games/pcsx2]$ file libspu2x-2.0.0.so
libspu2x-2.0.0.so: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, BuildID[sha1]=ecc8471906cda77ab15e125bc18ad4160f5ad928, stripped
[poni@Asuka /usr/lib/games/pcsx2]$ ldd libspu2x-2.0.0.so | rg "not found"
	libjack.so.0 => not found

So to fix it we need to sudo dnf install jack-audio-connection-kit.i686. This shouldn’t happen and it should be there as a dependency. I also encountered some weird Wine issues like a random obscure game crashing on a mov instruction with a memory address that doesn’t exist, even though it worked fine on Arch. For the usual complains dnf is slower than it should be, especially after adding some copr repos. I still like Fedora as a server though. When it comes to more obscure distros, I tried Guix for a day but after not being able to install everything I wanted I gave up. Same with Gentoo - I actually kinda liked it but I used it for a day (or half a day, the other half was installation) and I found the constant fighting with USEFLAGS to be annoying. I also had a problem using rustup on it. I might comeback to it in the future though, when I don’t have “more important” things to do and I can focus on getting better at using Gentoo. Maybe I’ll give NixOS a shot in the future (probably not, just like Guix it seems like one of those things that you love the idea of, however using it as a daily driver will be on the top of the pain hierarchy). From what I heard Void has a really cool package manager that lets you customize compiler flags for a specific package if you so desire while still being a binary distro, however not having SystemD is a nono for me (which wasn’t a problem for me in Guix but Guix gets a pass :P).