981–990 of 1001 posts
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As someone who came from vim, I find evil to be great tbh.
Why go to emacs then? What do you get that vim couldn't provide?
Vim has by far the better default user interface, though.
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I guess, those of us who actually like the idea should be more vocal. As otherwise the devs would read the comments and decide nobody likes what they do. Personally, I’m super happy about current Gnome. Coming after 10+ years of macOS. I don’t want to see that ugly mess of visual distractions on my screen all the time. Basic vitals like battery is okay for me. Distractions from apps, I don’t need them. They serve zer…
Thing is: That's your preference and nobody should force you to use these indicators. Even on Windows, the tray icons are usually mostly hidden away. I find them highly useful on macOS, but there I lack the configurability I have on Windows.
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I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
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You made me go back and read TFA, I don't think that's the case. Where did you saw that?
Update: nowhere, xi was just making stuff up. Many such cases.
Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…
I also used OneNote for the better part of a decade before switching to Linux in 2017. Joplin is ok-ish, but Obsidian is closer to OneNote with its folder-based layout.
Libreoffice/Openoffice have been doing this since quite early on (reason is that the ancestor StarOffice was designed as monolith, always loading the full suite of programs, and splitting it is probably very hard), so it seems to be an unofficial standard. On the other hand, it's disappointing, since I remember early M$ Office version being blazing fast (but again, I suspect that there was some preloading going on).
This does not appear to be the case for LibreOffice in my tests.
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Aside from slowness, feature creep leads to poor quality, i.e. tons of bugs and user confusion with ever-changing graphical interfaces. If software was simpler, we could afford to offer some formal guarantees of correctness. Model check protocols, verify pre and post conditions à la Dafny, etc. There's too much change for the sake of change.
> There's too much change for the sake of change. +1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally. The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases,…
He said it's often just some new marketing exec wants to put something on their resume, and they have certain metrics that they target that don't necessarily align with long term profits of the company.
I'm sure software has a similar problem.
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I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
It’s not rocket science to eke out oodles of performance out of a potato if you don’t care about correctness or memory safety.
Word 97 will only delight you if you use it on an airgapped computer, as a glorified typewriter, never open anyone else’s documents with it, and are diligent about manually saving the doc to multiple places for when it inevitably self-corrupts.
But at that point, why not be like GRRM and write on a DOS word processor? Those were historically a lot more reliable than these second-generation GUI apps.
What's old is new again. Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi... OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: htt…
I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
I think rosy recollection is tainting your memory here. How often docs would get corrupted due to those aforementioned memory safety issues, even if that Win95/98 box was never connected to the internet.
Of course it’s gonna be super snappy. It was designed to run on any Doom-compatible hardware. Which includes some toasters now.
Edit: it’s also worth noting that 1997 was right around the time where Moore’s law succumbed to the laws of physics for improving single-core CPU performance via clock speed alone.