I just tried out Zed and the way it does extensions and services is so awful from both a security and configurability standpoint I ended up immediately switching back to Helix. At least Gram is an option if you want one that’s GUI-first and it doesn’t automatically download random shit.

Isn’t that the website that gives granny smith a rating far lower than it deserves?

They’re getting threatened by the US and they can’t even change a word processor, lol good luck to them

Yes. Also I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way to keep the versions in sync between files because it doesn’t seem to have a lockfile or central version management either

Right now I use Helix and I’m trying to decide whether to switch to Zed. Because it almost looks like a better editor at this point, except its configuration is not as declarative as I’d like and its AI service uses a bunch of closed providers.

Recently I’ve been doing scripts on top of systemd to do hacky things with my system and so far I really like it

I like tools to be separated enough that I can do scripted/CLI calls with them through standard interfaces (as opposed to being a GUI/TUI monolith). All sorts of stuff can be done when tools output structured data like JSON that’s easy to parse and manipulate, or being able to interact with DBus APIs or services in other ways.

What I don’t like is when core tools try to be “smart” and reimplement things that other tools already do and end up making them more difficult to work with. Like package management, we already have Nix, Mise, and a billion other package managers, we don’t need another one. And turning the compiler into a package manager (cough Typst, .NET) is just stupid. Also programs editing their own configuration files is annoying as well, I can edit them myself and I don’t want them touching my edits, and if other people don’t want to do that then maybe a custom interface could be put in a UI/add-on of some sort that’s not part of the core tooling.

Also web browsers and web applications are close to bottom of the barrel in terms of scriptability. The stuff the Nix ecosystem had to do to make Firefox configurable is nightmarish and still janky, and Electron is an overall mess. Although with everyone wanting to make the programs work with AI agents now, maybe this will improve.

It should add a biometric duress option so that when cops do this it shoots themselves in the foot