So before I start ranting I would like to kinda explain what made me want to write this post. It all happened when I was just looking for people sharing their coding setups, it's a guilty pleasure of mine. But I came across this video where someone showed off their "minimal software" setup for code editing, I clicked expecting someone using, well, a minimal setup. Instead this person showed of their agentic AI cursor setup.
Now, I don't want to seem old fashioned (I am 18 I don't want to feel old yet) but last time I checked running a web browser with a wannabe text editor inside that has 5 of planktons assistents plugged in at all times does not sound very minimal to me. Which made me wonder if a lot of these minimal setups are like this. I was unfortunately correct with my assumption and there was an entire wave of people calling their webbrowser running a webbrowser and text completions brother "minimal". HOW?
Now, I might annoy some people with this, but suckless software does not suck less. Like seriously. If you think not having a config file is more minimal and will give u a noticable boost in preformance then I BEG you to checkout something like cage. But in all seriousness I've seen so many people use suckless tools, and call them minimal just because they are suckless. Like I'm sorry but your dwm setup with 30 patches and picom + blur + animations is not minimal in the slightest.
I don't think this is like, a huge deal but I just feel so suprised how many tools and/or features people add to their minimal builds
I'm a university compsci student, so I need a lot of tools due to the amount of different languages I need to learn because of this I often try to keep these setups very small and not too advanced, for example lets look at my C setup, which I use for all of my c programming both for personal toy projects or assignments
Simple, C is a simple lanugage, so why would I ever need assistance if I can just write the code myself, I don't need all this fancy tooling. "Oh but I would never be able to write without an lsp!!" just get good? But on a serious note if you don't think you'd be able to write without an lsp, then you are either underestimating yourself heavily, or you are suffering from a profane lack of skill.
C is very simple, which makes not using an lsp very easy and something I don't often notice. But does that mean setups like
that are viable for bigger lanugages, the answer if ofcourse they are. Now I am not saying u should, this isn't
about making a godly minimal ricers setup (see last paragraph of this post). I had to make 2 haskell projects this semester
one was a graphical space game where u had to get from point a to point b, the other was the same game but now u need to shoot
rocks, they explode after 3 hits and drop ore, which u need to collect and bring back to you base while managing your feul.
The projects were a lot of fun, but I was having some issues with my haskell setup, namely the lsp didn't work.
So I just decided that I was gonna work without it, and not only was the experience honestly seamless but I am the first
person I know who finished this project, which says something about how productive a full dev enviroment makes you.
Well I used an emacs packages called haskell-mode in order to get syntax highlighting, and I used the emacs lgrep
command, this command just recursively calls grep in your directory in order to search for a match in all of your project
files. That's it, when I needed to reformat something I just quickly called lgrep and search for the value. This whole
experience really made me appreciate the older tools and way of doing things, a modern equivalent would be using ripgrep's
rg command.
So now ask yourself, if some kid can work like this no issues, why do you need a full blown web browser with AI injected
like it's some essential fluid just for your 5 user astro.js project. The answer is you don't, infact I am more
then slightly convinced that most people are perfectly capable of this but they have been so comfortable with these tools
that they think they could never live without them.
My goal with this post wasn't to convince people they should drop all tooling and work exclusively with grepping and maybe
syntax highlighting. I honestly think LSP's are awesome and somethign I heavily reccomend most people use. It also wasn't
to stroke my own ego. Instead what I wanted to achieve was showing that when u get down to the premise, we are just editing
text files. We REALLY don't need to overcomplicate our workflows and while some features can be very
helpfull they are in no reason required to program. Esspecially LLM based tooling, seriously that shit usually doesn't
even help and all it really does is add a whole new layer between your feedback loop of writing testing and rewriting.
But yeah I just wanted to kinda dump this here, so that's all cya!
oh yeah also for the curious, I did end up getting haskell language server to work properly :D