Good Tools Are Invisible

I only recently switched to emacs, and my motivation was not that I like tinkering but that having a flexible gui thing I can create custom views for w/ LLMs have basically 0 cost of producing new tools/uis. It's much the same with the linux example, I have been a lifelong windows user but switched around a year ago. I've tried multiple times in the past but hated tinkering and the issues that came up so never stuck with it. Now with LLMs I'm using a tiling wm and can just have a suite of hotkeys that automate everything I need to do, and if I ever want a new thing I can create the new view in a minute and never think about it again. The niceness in openness in tools is being about to integrate with everything else I use effortlessly. I wouldn't say invisibility the goal, but even further the idea of an isolated tool is an abstraction of the general human-computer interface. Your window manager is just as much a part of your ide or text editor as anything else, it's just the mediating layers between you and the program. From a phenomenological perspective the distinction between the different tools or piece of software is essentially arbitrary. Having more open tools that allow you to integrate with your WM and other things allows you to create that effortless, thoughtless experience. I would say a good tool is frictionless, not invisible. What constitutes frictionless for different people will obviously vary based on say how many different computers do you need to work on, what is the breadth of different kind of software and environments you need to work on? How do you control going between those? A frictionless code editor for me is not a code editor that is simple like sublime which in order to integrate with what I do I assume I could figure out some way to do it with a ton of custom scripting, but what is frictionless for me is what is open enough to allow me to go between a variety of different contexts without thinking about it, and being able to have whatever I want at hand without thinking about it. In the past I hate tinkering so much I would have never wanted to deal with this, and on windows particular it's practically not possible.

Just as an example of a frictionless tool, along with programming I also make music (including for some games I work on). When I was on windows to set up practicing playing music I had a preset in my daw I could open quickly, it would need to load then I could begin playing. On linux I just have something built into my taskbar with a performant amp sim and other audio thing always running so at any particular moment I can simply click something in my taskbar and immediately start using my guitar, mic, or analog synth I have set up on my computer. There's another menu to manage the mixing between channels, and things to run midi backing tracks I can practice to play along with. I could do this all on windows but doing each specific thing would require running something, making sure all my devices are still set up properly, using some other program whose UI I don't control to do something for me and just doing a bunch of different steps that impedes my ability to do this. Now I can just the moment I want to click something and it is immediately working with 0 frustration, it's a frictionless tool. I'm not just programming I'm also making music, games, assets for those games, and being able to leverage my WM/text editor to keep track of those things so I can cognitively offload them, and switch between them painlessly is to me the benefit of tooling. If I'm doing stuff with a team I can still leverage most of it but obviously the rest of the team isn't able to see the stuff I use to interact with it. The cost of creating small bespoke script/tooling/uis is essentially 0 now, and using AI to create bespoke tooling to me is a much safer approach than using AI to create code as it's just not really an issue if there's a bug in some of my personal scripts. I use odin for the game I am working on and I love it for it's simplicity and clarity, rather than using functions or programming language abstractions like classes to hide and organize functionality I just have some custom tooling for organize a mostly flat giant main game function. To me that's by far the least friction in understanding it and working on it. My main issue is across the projects I am working on, programming or otherwise, keeping things straight and coherent and being able to access and work with the associated files without thinking. Cognitively offloading to the greatest extent possible, so that what I do actually want to do is always at hand. I would say it's the opposite of invisibility though. (The psychoanalysis of what draws people to different editors is fairly boring and low effort, I absolutely hate tinkering. I am writing a game in Odin rather than using Godot because having to learn some poorly designed UI and how to futz around with it instead of just being able to do what I want is impossibly frustrating to me, it's a friction that locks me into future friction while the friction of learning emacs removed friction to other things)

>He turned sublime into the tool he wanted.

I think this also misses the point. Sublime just is the tool I want. I install it and I use it.

Eventually I may install a handful of add-ons via the baked in package control. But primarily it just is the text editor I want.

I would also say good tools have better "physics" they've got some coherent internal model that is somewhat easy to intuit about.

Picking from 100 options is what the mouse is best for. Keyboards require learning so they are best for the options you do often enough to learn. I know about 10 different vi commands of the hundreds.

There is more than selecting options. Selecting text is normally better with a mouse.