awk is nice in a lot of cases, especially for tabular data, but it's hard to deny vim's capabilities for handling plain text using text objects. For instance, you can't really tell awk to just "extract this entire sentence" like you can with vim.
Maybe making it a frontend for an established dictionary format files (instead ob embedding all the data), so that other people could also use it with other dictionaries, would be a better design solution?
That's a good idea for a generalized fork, I agree. I quite like the look and feel of the current approach, and it would be nice to be able to use it with other data sources.
...And just the other day I was thinking about maybe trying XFCE out :)
Now, currently I'm using LXQt (which is probably even more bare bones and "get the job done" DE), what can XFCE give me? I mean, I certainly see a point when people switch to XFCE from Gnome or KDE. But what about if coming from the other side of the spectrum?
Yeah, I understand that it sort of sits in between. But what are those "additional" features compared to a more spartan DEs? More included apps / accessories? More access to the machine's properties (like, more GUIs for various options)? Something else?
Good for you. If you're happy with it, that's great.
The thing is this: the controls on a vertical taskbar should be horizontal, and they should rearrange themselves in rows according to its width. So, horizontal buttons with horizontal text for each window, and status icons in columns and rows.
Any and all desktops with a start menu and a taskbar are just variations of Windows 95, and this is how Windows 95 worked. Most of the ripoffs don't do it right, and can't. A few (e.g. KDE) do it but really badly, so you get a HUGE start button and a HUGE clock, for instance.
Most people don't remember Win95 now, but I do. It really annoys me when the knock-offs can't do things the original did 29 years ago.
Can you imagine if someone came along with a new version of Vim, but they'd changed all the keystrokes and replaced all the : commands with English verbs? Instead of :wq or :x you typed SAVE FILE? People would laugh mockingly and go use something else.
That's how I feel about a half-done version of the taskbar-and-start-menu interface, like in MATE or Cinnamon.
Original Windows 95 fit into 32MB of disk space because that was the original maximum size of FAT16 drives. It was a tiny, simple OS. If someone presents me with a UI that copies the Win95 one, and basically every other FOSS desktop except GNOME >=3, Unity and Pantheon does, then the least I expect is an accurate copy of the very simple functionality that Windows 95 provided in 4MB of RAM.
Take that away, and it's ruined. It's Vim with no command mode and only cursor keys: you might as well use Notepad.
Notepad is perfectly usable and it's all a lot of people need. I'm not mocking anyone happy with it. I expect a bit more though.
You still have to rely on POSIX and / or GNU tools in most scenarios, and if already knowing / using those, then why bother to switch to anything else?
I don't know how common my situation is, but I don't have any of those constraints. I have eza aliased to ls both on my daily driver and all of my work servers and it hasn't caused me a single problem.
The only time you have to care about GNU tools vs your own preference of tool is when writing scripts to run on computers running some Linux distributions, and per [1] you shouldn’t be using ls for that.
Yes but if you work professionally as a software engineer, chances are that you don't only use your PC. Being that a server that you connect remotely to develop on, or a production system where you connect to investigate a bug, or the PC of a coworker you are helping, or getting inside a container, etc.
Getting to know and use a standard setup makes you efficient in that situations, that is also the reason why I learned to use vim (since vim or at least vi you can take for granted there is on every system).
The only concession that I make is the shell, since zsh is much more convenient to use than bash, even if every time I use a system with bash I of course write some code that works in zsh and have to remember that in bash you can't do it. That is annoying, but to me it's worth it to use a better shell, not worth probably for an `ls` clone.
My setup does not deviate from that. As the sibling comment points out, `ls` responds everywhere (even powershell on Windows), it's just nicer on my local machine.
Coworker machines are whole different issue though - most of them have American keyboards (I do not), most of them do not use editors with vim bindings etc.
