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Sorry fam for the late response! I was writing up a draft a couple of days ago, but that one somehow disappeared. Which…, is kinda peculiar as I don’t recall the last time a draft spoofed out of existence. Regardless, it really puts me off to start a reply all over. As such, I’ve been mustering motivation since 😅. Anyhow, thank you for your patience!

Thank you (also) for sharing your journey around the many text editors! If anything, it reminds me how life has got many surprises for us. As such, being wed to any software, regardless of how powerful it may be, may still result in a break later down the line.

Thank you (once more) for touching on ergonomics! I haven’t mentioned it, but I do experience some RSI-related pains/aches.

Anyhow, I do have concerns on how Emacs’ default keybindings might be detrimental on someone using a regular keyboard. I believe this article makes an interesting case on this. That’s also one of the reasons why I’ve (almost) exclusively been on evil mode.

I hope you’ve recovered completely from the strain on your pinky! And, hopefully, nothing else has been causing any issues since!

Btw, the trick with ci" and ca" is pretty cool! Thank you for teaching me something new! FWIW, it was reproducible within Emacs’ evil mode*.

Could you elaborate on the reform?

For some reason, I was under the impression that laptops in the MNT Reform series were the only laptops that were manufactured using open (source) hardware only. Or, if there were others, that it must have been doing something so special that they deserved to be put on a pedestal. But, currently, I don’t feel confident enough to state why it would be superior over say the Olimex TERES-I or Pinebook Pro.

I hear the hype yet to me it looks like a severely overpriced tv box with some low-grade peripherials strapped to it in the least space efficient way possible.

We definitely pay a premium, but I don’t know exactly why. Especially when the aforementioned Olimex TERES-I and Pinebook Pro are almost an order of magnitude cheaper.

Did they got rockchip to release sources instead of blobs or something?

From what I understood, Rockchip offers (at least some of) its SoCs as open source hardware. So, what MNT Reform did for the SoC is order them as open source hardware and include/publicize/provide all the schematics (etc).

What is the praise actually for?

FWIW, the open source hardware aspect is what I was intrigued by*.

No worries, fam! And thank you for clarifying! Based on your answer, I’ll assume that Konsole should suit you more than well for the time being. The moment you’re starting to ‘live’ inside a terminal is when looking elsewhere for something more advanced and/or powerful starts to make a lot more sense.

I’ll check out Warp/Wave, thanks!

Aight. Glad to hear that you’re interested! Have a good one, fam 😉.

Hehe, you read right through me 😂. Thanks fam for the heads up!

Anyhow, I’ve learned so much from you and I really appreciate that. Again, wholeheartedly, thank you!

Wish ya a good one 😉!

I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy.

OP, to be frank, descriptions like “general terminal stuff” and “nothing terribly fancy” are too generic to be useful here. Though, I suppose this is simply indicative that you’re (probably) perfectly served (as is) by Konsole.

what do you folks use

Ptyxis

and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?

Because it came with the distro and I had no need for something different.

One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.

Unsure if I understood you correctly, but perhaps Warp and Wave are worth looking into for ya.

I got a couple I really like, though for vastly different reasons:

• The MNT Reform series takes the crown for their commitment towards open source software AND open source hardware.
• The ASUS Zenbook DUO is an early entry in the direction of what I perceive as peak design. This technology will only improve from here and I hope other vendors will take cues from this one.

Thank you so much for your patience in teaching me something new! Much, much appreciated!

With the help of your observations, I can confidently say that the different dither methods don’t play much of a role after filtering with a better palette has already been done. So palette-filtering -if we can refer to it as such- is the actual MVP in resolving this issue.

animated webp may also be an option

Hehe :P , I’ll take note of this and perhaps resort to it the next time. The whole palette-filtering stuff seemed like some occult incantations that somehow worked. But I would much rather use a different (sane) format instead.

Again, I would like to stress that I’ve very much enjoyed this interaction! While it’s been (mostly) totally unrelated to the original post, this has actually been one of the most informative interactions found within its comments. Therefore, thank you!

Aight. Anyhow, this has been a lovely conversation fam! Thanks for your contributions!

Aight. This conversation has been much appreciated, thanks fam!

Perhaps I might have to give ed a go at some point if I find myself hacking more with elisp rather than outputting actual productive work. But, at least for now, this is (thankfully) not really a concern for mine 😜.

As for Sam, I should either install a different OS (i.e. 9front) for the truely special experience. Or…, build it (myself) with plan9port. Did I get that right?

UPDATE: For posterity’s sake, I’d like to reflect on the last couple of days.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone that has contributed to the discussion! Were it not for your recommendations/suggestions/endorsements, then I might not have found a valid alternative.

Secondly, I’ve taken every single recommendation pretty seriously. As such, I’ve either installed them to see for myself if I was able to reproduce the functionality found in the gif found above. Or, didn’t install them to begin with due to the suggested installation methods not passing through my (rather) strict policy on software. Regardless, in the end, I’ve only found two pieces of software that satisfied the bill: Kate and KDevelop.

KDevelop is pretty cool, but is more of an IDE rather than a text editor. As such, I’ve landed on Kate.

But, perhaps more than anything, I’ve come to really appreciate Emacs (and Neovim). And, perhaps more than ever, I feel ready to take them on 💪. Wish me luck 😊.

UPDATE: For posterity’s sake, I’d like to reflect on the last couple of days.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone that has contributed to the discussion! Were it not for your recommendations/suggestions/endorsements, then I might not have found a valid alternative.

Secondly, I’ve taken every single recommendation pretty seriously. As such, I’ve either installed them to see for myself if I was able to reproduce the functionality found in the gif found above. Or, didn’t install them to begin with due to the suggested installation methods not passing through my (rather) strict policy on software. Regardless, in the end, I’ve only found two pieces of software that satisfied the bill: Kate and KDevelop.

KDevelop is pretty cool, but is more of an IDE rather than a text editor. As such, I’ve landed on Kate.

But, perhaps more than anything, I’ve come to really appreciate Emacs (and Neovim). And, perhaps more than ever, I feel ready to take them on 💪. Wish me luck 😊.

Thank you for the raving endorsement and otherwise very informative reply!

Also I have migrated from Emacs to Nvim, the reasons are purely ergonomical (pinky fatigue is a real issue) but after switching I found a jump in the way to think about an editor. Emacs is great, don’t get me wrong, and if you decide to learn Emacs I can assure you it will be the best editor you’ve used, but it still edits things at a character level, while there are concepts for matching brackets or quotes changing the text inside quotes in Emacs is very character oriented, I.e. go to start of quote, start marking, move to matching quote, delete, whereas in vim is sort of a higher level language where you say Change Inside Next Quote using cin", and expanded with some plugins you can even do srnq' to Surround Replace Next Quote with ’ (which will change the quotations on the next text from whatever to '). And that’s a lot closer to the way I think so it skips a mental step (plus it’s a lot less keystrokes and no Ctrl for my pinky).

Hmm…, interesting. I’m still pretty new to evil-mode, but doesn’t that bridge the gap here? Btw, I don’t know why, but I wasn’t able to see for myself how cin" worked within Vim*.

Thank you so much for this! Hopefully I’m not bothering you with this*.

Did you scale the source with ffmpeg?

I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think I did. The invoked command was the following:

❯ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.gif

Do you have a visual pattern in your console background?

I don’t think I do. It doesn’t look like it at least. To be clear, even on my laptop I notice the visual pattern visible in the gif. But that’s totally absent when I’m working within Emacs. Or at least, it looks as if it’s just a singular solid color.

The second best to render a small enough size that it does not get resized in the browser.

Hmm…, makes sense. Not a huge fan, though 😅. Hopefully I can solve it through other means instead.

I assume you scaled it up

Yup. For the sake of readability*. But the upscaling (or rather zooming in*) was done natively within Emacs.

Alright, so I went to do some digging and the pattern only starts to show up in the gif. Perhaps as a result of the smaller color palette*. Regardless, I tried to see if it is solved by simply generating a ‘better’ palette and using it as a filter of sorts. Furthermore, in case that wasn’t enough, I also tried playing with different dither algorithms:

Does any one of the above gifs do better?

Ah xD, no problem fam! Please keep us updated :P .

I have looked into plugins, but nothing I’ve found suggests to contain/offer the desired functionality.

Thank you so much for this information! It confirms that Kate is very competent, yet clears where it may fall short compared to Zed.

Aight, I’ll keep Kate around for the time being. And I’ll definitely take Zed into consideration whenever I’m in search of an IDE.

And again as I’ve said before I don’t wanna distro hop anymore, this isn’t my first distro

Ah okay, somehow that went over my head. Apologies*. Thanks for clarifying, though!

so am focused on the long term and reliability of the thing.

it’s up to date but stable, and it’s basically taken the place that Ubuntu originally held as a jack of all trades of sorts

Noted. Thanks (again) for clarifying!

Ubuntu has been extremely hit or miss for me in regards to stability and updates (literally the system at one point nearly bricked itself when trying to upgrade and am now stuck on a specific Ubuntu version forever because of it, the updating thing seems completely borked for me, can’t upgrade it without wiping the whole thing and this isn’t the first or last time anything Ubuntu based has done this to me before, updating it is very dreadful for me because it’s a complete gamble), and as far as I know Fedora seems to be a lot more stable and polished on that front, haven’t heard anything majorly bad about it.

Pff…, there’s a lot to unpack here. Heck, I could dedicate a whole comment just on this. Unsure if you’d be interested, though 😅. Regardless, the gist would be that uncompromised stability across updates on Linux has historically been (and mostly remains to be) a hard problem to solve. This isn’t because the Linux ecosystem is incompetent, instead the onus is on the freedom we enjoy on this platform and the consequences that very freedom entails.

Anyhow, I do agree that Fedora (or at least some variant of it) does better than Ubuntu in this regard. There are high-profile Ubuntu veterans that have since migrated to ‘Fedora’ for stability and they’ve been very much enjoying themselves with the improved experience.

what legal stuff would be concerning if I may ask? Heard at one point they were gonna get rid of hardware acceleration or something because of legalities or whatever?? But then changed their minds? Idk, stuff like that worries me a bit haha.

Please feel absolutely free to ask fam. At least :P , as long as you can bear my ramblings 😂.

So…, like a lot of other^[1] independent distros, Fedora is not able to ship with everything the end user might require for smooth onboarding. Instead, for hardware acceleration and more, the end user is responsible to install it themselves if they desire full functionality. This shouldn’t be too much of a deal; some might just regard it as part of the first installation process. However, sometimes, Fedora (and the aforementioned distros) are legally bound to cease support of existing functionality. That’s where things get ugly 😅; see this thread. Note that this isn’t lost forever as changes like these just introduce more elements/bullets/articles to RPM Fusion’s Howto’s. Though, it goes without saying that Ubuntu handles this a lot more gracefully.

Thankfully, there are downstream projects of Fedora that are not -or, rather, don’t seem to be- legally bound to the same extent. As such, onboarding is handled better. Heck, some even come with exceptional system management promises (on which they deliver), that ensure your system continues to function as desired. I can share some of my first-hand experiences with these: on multiple occasions I didn’t experience any breakage or whatsoever from the supposed loss of functionality that other users were affected by. Why? Because the maintainers of the downstream project I run on my system handled it without requiring any input from me. It genuinely feels like dark sorcery at times :P .

I think you’ve done an excellent job at capturing my initial thoughts. It basically felt as if using Emacs was bound to be overkill as my (relatively simple) use case didn’t seem to warrant its usage.

But, even if it is (possibly) overkill, I do prefer^[1] how Emacs handles the folding. So, while there’s the very real possibility that I’ll not even utilize 1% of Emacs’ potential, I feel most excited and (somehow) comfort while working with it 😅.

As for setting things up, I immediately started using Emacs through Spacemacs until the input lag became very noticeable on larger files. Then, I pivoted to Doom Emacs and I’ve been enjoying it so far. Perhaps I’ll create my own config at some point in the future, But for now, Doom Emacs is all I need.

Interesting insights. Much appreciated!

I DO like to code via ED because the design and workflow of ED (or even better: Sam) makes folding unnecessary because you only put on the screen what is needed right at that moment. Want to see two functions 1000 lines apart? No problem, just print them right below each other on the screen.

Hmm…, I suppose this is a workflow I’d have to try out for myself before drawing any conclusions. Though, I got some questions:

• Why ed? Isn’t any other TUI/CLI text editor fit for the job? Apologies if I sound obtuse/obnoxious*. I’m probably just very ignorant of how ed fares compared to the others.
• Is there any currently maintained version of Sam? A quick search suggests that everyone packaged/grabbed it from this github repo. But, unfortunately, that one has been archived since earlier this year. I suppose I could look into the many forks it has, but I’d rather be picky 😅. Got any pointers for me?