The Indian state of Kerala uses Linux(Edubuntu) in all the schools. This incident happened back in 2010. I was not that proficient in Linux but I liked it for some reasons.

So one day, one of my IT teachers was handed the responsibility to edit a video. Being the School Student IT Convenor, he asked for my help. I'm no Video Editor but this thing was so easy that Openshot was enough.

While I was at it, he said: "Why does the govt. want us to use such unprofessional stuff? If it was Windows we could do everything very easily. Who is ever gonna use Linux in a professional environment? The govt. is spoiling the children by urging them to use Linux, Free Software and Open Source."

I couldn't argue that day. But today I so wish I could go back and roast him!

What's with the 4 pixel wide scrollbars on some desktop software these days? Does nobody care about accessibility anymore?

No seriously.

Fuck you.

And why the fuck does open source software seem to be the main culprit - as usual.

And tutorials telling us to add an extra blank line to our source code because fucking Linux distros decide to put an overlay horizontal scrollbar just over the top of where the last visible line in an editor appears.

I've been working towards a degree in CS recently after being out of school nearly 10 years. I've been trying really hard to keep an open mind and not complain about the professors, but I have to let this out.

My one class we have to write all of our code in their specified editor which I hate, but I understand the need for standardization, but then once it is error free we have to copy and paste the code into ms word and turn it in!! Really?! In 2018 I can't just submit my source files and you open them to run and grade? I seriously have to copy my code into ms word for you to grade it? I don't even understand how you would grade that because it kills the formatting and readability, not to mention the quotes get changed to their curly counterpart which isn't valid syntax.

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

I fucking hate Electron, what ever happened to developing software natively? It's not like you have to stick to dot Net and C# or whatever, there's literally Lazarus or Delphi, which, at least Lazarus, not only is open source but also supports all major platforms.

Even Python has GTK, Qt and Pywin32 or whatever its called. While not exactly cross platform, it's still not eating up 1GB of RAM when you launch it.

I don't care if Bob from across the street uses it because he's too lazy to learn anything new, but when huge companies like fucking Discord (valued at 10B dollars) use it, it's insane.
More than once has Discord had a memory leak and was reaching upwards of 6.5GB of RAM usage.

Whats the most popular code editor? VSCode, Electron.
Chat client? Discord, Electron.
Wanna use something other than Discord? Maybe Matrix? Well guess what, while they do have multiple clients, the most developed and usable one is Element, yeah, Electron.
Slack? Electron
My crypto wallet? Exodus, Electron.

I genuinely don't think 16GB of RAM is enough nowadays. Thankfully I'm running a very minimal install of Arch Linux and do most of my work in a KVM, but it still hurts my brain.

By the way things are looking nowadays, We'll be using Javascript for Kernels soon.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Also apparently the filter on this site sees ". net" as an url.

When I was 12 I created my own LEGO manuals and monopoly boardgame variants.
When I was 14 and into gaming I had fun playing with a Q3 level editor for Wolfenstein (GtkRadiant), and drew boardgame maps.
When I was 16 I translated the game battledawn.com to French for in-game currency in return.
When I was 18 I fiddled with texture packs for Minecraft and got interested in Total War mods.
When I was 20 I met a student who studied webdev & design. I was so excited about basic HTML, CSS and later JS and PHP, that I read and learnt some every evening (and even failed an exam because I was learning PHP until 5AM)

I always wanted to use my skills to create something of use to others. Open-source is the perfect avenue for that and is also what enabled me to get here in the first place. And though I m've been professionally employed as dev since 2015, only the last 2 yrs I finally consider myself skilled enough to give back something of quality :)

Tabs, or No Tabs? I did the same as this commentor 2 years ago. I can code so quick now because of this simple switch. Here's why:

(source, Laracasts.com)

Ben Smith
"I think the most beneficial tip was to do away with tabs. Although it took a while to get used to and on many occasions in the first few days I almost switched them back on, it has done wonders for my workflow.

I find it keeps my brain more engaged with the task at hand due to keeping the editor (and my mind) clutter free. Before when I had to refer to a class, I would have opened it in a new tab and then I might have left it open to make it easier to get to again. This would quickly result in a bar full of tabs and navigation around the editor would become slow and my brain would get bogged down keeping track of what was open and which tab it was in. With the removal of the tab bar I'm now able to keep only the key information in my mind and with the ability to quickly switch between recently opened files, I find I haven't lost any of the speed which I initially thought I might.

In fact this is something I have noticed in all areas of writing code, the more proficient I have become with an editor the better the code I have been writing. Any time spent actually writing your code is time in which your brain is disconnected from the problem you are trying to solve. The quicker you are able to implement your ideas in code, the smaller the disconnect becomes. For example, I have recently been learning how to do unit testing and to do so I have been rewriting an old project with tests included. The ability to so quickly refactor has meant that whereas before I might have taken 30 seconds shuffling code around, now I can spend maybe 5 seconds allowing my mind to focus much better on how best to refactor, not on the actual process of doing so."

jeff_way Mod
"Yeah - it takes a little while to get used to the idea of having no tabs. But, I wouldn't go back at this point. It's all about forcing yourself into a faster workflow. If you keep the tabs and the sidebar open, you won't use the keyboard."

I found the best text editor for basic code fixing

For a couple of days, I was looking for a simple terminal-based text editor for taking simple code notes or basic code fixing kinds of stuff.

As an aspiring developer, I really like the concept of coding without touching the mouse.

So I downloaded the king of CLI text editors, Vim.

Now, guess what happened.

Yeah, you're right. I stuck inside vim and couldn't even quit from there.

Then, I started watching a bunch of tutorials and started reading vim's documentation.

But then I realized, I have to learn a lot of things only to operate vim and it's a pretty lengthy process.

At that time, I really needed a very simple text editor for doing basic stuff.

But, vim is not simple... you know :)

So, I had to come back to 'nano' & I was not happy enough to write codes by using 'nano'.

Suddenly, I discovered another really cool text editor called 'micro'.

It's really awesome.

It's not as advanced as vim but definitely a lot better than nano.

Micro is an open-source command-line text editor created by Zachary Yedidia.

Some basic key points of Micro:
1. It's really easy to operate.
2. It has different colours and highlights.
3. It supports syntaxes for over 70+ programming languages.
4. It has mouse support.
5. Plugins & colour schemes.

The best thing for me is colour schemes & screen split support.

Check out my full article on DEV - @souviktests.

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

Visual studio code

I usually use IDEs and am in love with everything made by Jetbrains. I am also to lazy to setup dual boot on my pc, so I live with windows 10. After one of the recent downgrades Microsoft distribute, they shipped this lightweight text editor called visual studio code with it.

It lied to me, that it's a good editor for coding C. It even tells me that I can compile and execute the code from inside the editor, similar to vim. I went to the settings and found a dark theme, for the best best feature this "editor"has to offer.

I give it a try by opening a source file with a normal double click. Editor gets focused, but the code is nowhere to be seen. Retrying conforms my, that this piece of shit is literally not able to open files UNLESS you drag and drop them into the editor. HOW FUCKING USELESS IS THAT?

Next I want to compile the program. Guess what, that functionality was not given or at least I could not find it (same goes with the manual)

Even with dark theme it burns my eyes to use this editor. There are almost no useful shortcuts. The functionality is not even comparable to vim. I always thought eclipse was bad, until this shit was installed.

It might work well for other people. Maybe it has functions, that just don't work on my pc, but from what I've seen: visual studio in general and especially that editor feels like Microsoft trying to replace the toolet paper with sandpaper.

Serverless and death of Programming?!

_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.

_Long Rant_

Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.

_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.

So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...

_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.

_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...

On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.

On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...

It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...

Spaces vs tabs has kind of become a non-argument for web tech and the former has won (at least in every place I've worked or observed in open source projects).

Although I don't really care (just stick to one for the same codebase) I don't get why spaces won. Given the argument is mostly about how we like to read code individually, and tab width can be configured per editor while space cannot, why did spaces win?

Well editor? nvim
Vim that just works.

But actual IDE? Most certainly the JetBrains products. The very best code completion, code generation, error checker, etc... all that even in the open source Community Edition :)

What do you guys think about using Pyqt for building an open source Svg Editor?

Hey. Is there better open source image editor on mac than GIMP or Pinta?
I like GIMP but it has a bit complicated UI

nano or IDLE, depending on need.

nano is the best terminal text editor by far, as i don't wanna have to learn a new command line and 2 control modes just to type in ffffffffffucking vim and it's just powerful enough to do what is needed without extra crap on top.

IDLE is super-light-weight, has a somewhat-handy debugger if i need to see what's up when my code interacts with modules or some such, takes up very little RAM and is open-source. Works exactly as needed and no more.

Since a friend of mine owns a domain for an open-source project and manages pretty much everything, including dealing with a db for registered accounts, I'm currently not really able to help when it comes to UI/UX things and frontend, besides the "main editor", which is like the core functionality of the project. I would like to set up smth like docker (on Windows 10 home, which is already not suitable, great start🤦) for some kind of pseudo-db all inclusive functionality thingy to be able to run a working example locally. Also a goal would be to switch to Typescript, include testing, to use webpack and to automate as much as possible.
Sad part is, I don't even know where to start and I'm also 100% sure that I will do almost everything wrong from research to implementation.😐