I just have one account & remote-follow a bunch of people. I find the remote aspect transparent enough that I never really think about it, actually.

Personally, I set up a few accounts and settled on an instance with a bunch of interesting users and a theme I liked. It was witches.town. Remote follows work pretty well. I don’t think that’d be an issue with most instances.

I would like to see more apps/api level support for one user with multiple accounts, since there are instances I really liked but not as much as witches.town. It does let you import/export account data as a CSV if you want to move or your instance shuts down, though.

I use compatible protocols on my website and aggregator, and interact without an account at all :)

Hypothesis: no one with a positive expected contribution cares if something is named “bro”.

Other hypothesis: some people with a positive expected contribution are put off by pointless time-sink PC publicity efforts.

I was a vim user for around 15 years. I still “think” in vim motions. I switched to Spacemacs using the vim-style keybindings afforded by evil-mode. I had a very extensively customized .vimrc and .vim (you know it’s serious when you use a directory) and used various “slime” modes over the years (vim-slime was my last one) to integrate a copy/paste into other tmux panes. I maintained a lot of custom code to enable an integrated repl experience for the languages I used the most (editing sql and testing with psql/sqlite3; editing python and interacting with ipython; editing clojure and interacting with the clojure repl). I had a fancy Unite-based workflow for file-finding and project management.

In short, everything I had customized was implemented out of the box on Spacemacs. I enabled modes for the languages I used (clojure, python, sql, html, javascript) and it all just kinda works. git/gist integration just works. The motions I used worked. It was very easy to figure out how to make an evil operator for executing code and then use that + motions to emulate the fine-grained selection I had become accustomed to with vim-sexp/vim-sexp-mappings-for-regular-people/surround.vim + tmux. The best thing was a ton of functionality was unlocked for clojure/python thanks to modes already being integrated and built. I could stop maintaining my vim installation and focus on other issues.

Some highlights for Spacemacs for someone whose only experience with emacs was knowing how to kill it (the wrong way mind you; C-z into pkill -9 emacs).

• Spacemacs is discoverable. The leader key is Space and once you hit that, a menu pops up with completions. In fact, these completions pop up whenever you start a key chord. They default to waiting 0.4 seconds, but I overrode that in the .spacemacs config file to be 0.1 second. This is awesome when you don’t know emacs. (This functionality is called helm and which-key).
• Spacemacs is curated. I didn’t know what the git interface in emacs is (magit if you’re curious). If I would have had to spend months copy/pasting/tweaking elisp I found online to get half of what I spent 15 years acquiring in vim, I would have never switched. In Spacemacs SPC shows that g is for git and then you see a bunch of actions explained. This is easy.
• Spacemacs is a very complete vim experience. Registers work. Macros work. The motions you expect work. You can use operators and define new ones. Your chords will basically work. The difference is that you can jump to the source code and use an elisp debugger inline in Spacemacs. This is pretty awesome for discovering/tweaking once you find something you want to change. elisp is in a lot of ways similarly high level like Python, Ruby, or Lua. You don’t have to “grok Lisp” to make some useful changes
• Spacemacs has decent documentation. In addition to SPC h which has a bunch of emacs builtin help/documentation, there is a full Read the Docs and each layer documents its shortcuts.
• Spacemacs has “Layers” which make it easy to add more curated sets of things so you can learn a piece at a time and have nice entry points for extension and learning the underlying system. Layers are sets of emacs packages and associated configuration/integration into the spacemacs ecosystem.
• Spacemacs is easy to configure. Most of what you need to do is encompassed in editing a heavily commented .spacemacs file that is well documented on the read the docs website. You can largely avoid copying/pasting random elisp snippets.

I’ve been using vim very heavily for about 10 years now and I’m currently a week into trying out a switch to emacs.

The main thing I like is honestly that things look way nicer - my switch was fed mainly by frustration with weird terminal UI issues, but has been sustained by 1) evil-mode means I can keep my vim editing ways, 2) plugins like magit that are just so much more feature-rich & polished, and 3) Emacs lisp is much nicer to use than vimscript.

Excellent distinction. Like many things, I think being able to use git effectively relies on having a good conceptual framework for the tool. Unfortunately for git, that means you kind of need to know all about how it works internally (i.e. be able to put yourself in the implementer mindset) while “better” tools allow you to have a simpler or more easily-explained mental model (i.e. maintain a user mindset).

What were your largest costs? If it’s number of dynos, you can sometimes spend time working on performance to speed up your code enough where you can decrease dynos. Even if you end up moving off it’s never a bad thing to have a faster app.

If it’s database, that’s hard to work around. Though if you are going to run your own DB somewhere else you could connect to it from your Heroku app. I would argue that our (I work for Heroku) DB service is killer though. I know some apps who run their own servers but connect to our DBs since it gets them so many things like fork/followers/point-in-time-recover.

A basic app setup is one hobby dyno ($7) and a hobby DB ($10). Then maybe some addons, Redis is a must have for many apps these days ($15 if you’re going to bump to “premium” right away). That’s $32. If you were going to run those three services on DO, that would be three droplets or about $15. So you’re saving about $17 on DO. Alternatively if you’re running free version of Redis then you’re saving $2 on DO.

As you grow your hobby dyno needs to be replaced by a “standard” dyno. If you’re running 2 then you’re now at $82 a month. I think that’s the biggest hit, the jump from hobby to “standard”. Most Rails devs in the freelance world I know are charging between $150 - 200 an hour. So if Heroku can save you a little more than half an hour a month, it’s paid for its price.

If this is a passion project or a “for fun” app then, I realize the math doesn’t always work that way. It can also be fun to do your own “full stack” setup, and get your hands dirty in nginx config and postgres backup daemons and administration.

I’m obviously biased and as an employee I get my dynos for free. I’ll be curious to hear more about your specific situation and setup to see if I could help optimize things.

One thing that doesn’t quite make sense in this analysis is that it implies that Objective C will be more popular than Swift.

I’m guessing that’s from people that tried to jump right into Swift, but got bitten by immaturities in the language/toolchain & are switching back; plus, Objective-C → Swift is probably such an obvious transition that there aren’t many blog posts about it.

I used to use seil and karibiner on a mac to dual map caps lock - hold for ctrl, tap for esc - but those stopped working in Sierra.

Has anyone got those working?

That works pretty well, but I prefer to Control on Caps (with Backspace on left control, and Caps moved across to Backspace). Makes both chord-ing and editing easier in general. Still haven’t found a good place for Escape instead. Maybe switch with tilde? Just close enough to reach without moving my entire hand, far enough away to not knock?

pull double-duty as both a control key and escape.

is there a way to do this on gnome?

That’s what I do, I never use caps lock anyway. :)

They haven’t made a stable release in a while, but it looks like Factor is still quite active. Their Github repo is buzzing with activity.

I really liked Factor – it was the first open-source project I got involved in. I believe Slava is working on the Swift compiler team now though.

Toronto

Same here.

I would guess because it requires that everyone be using Emacs (at least, that’s my impression; I would love to be mistaken). I really enjoyed Org for personal projects when I was an Emacs user, but for documents that I wanted everyone to be able to read-and-write I would be leery.

It seems to me (being the author, so biased) a bit unfair of you to write off my experience this way, but take it as you will. I find it sincerely beneficial, and as for it being hipster / macho-ism – wouldn’t someone have to notice for those things to be applicable? Until this article (and nofrils) randomly caught someones eye yesterday, it had like 5 views and nofrils had like 3 stars on github.. for months.

When I started, I was actually fairly sure I would hate it – I was challenged by a friend to do it for a week and ended up liking it. 20 years of development with 0 of those days being without syntax highlighting prior to that. I had written my own schemes (yes, plural) for vim. Heck, the reason I initially was drawn to vim was due to syntax highlighting being relatively consistent between languages.

I even tried Emacs (with Evil) for a bit mostly for rainbow-identifiers.

I first learned to code without syntax highlighting, wrote (and still sometimes write) code ideas with pen-and-paper, but syntax highlighting is just plain easier to read for me.

Came here to say this. At least for me, the benefits of syntax highlighting vastly outweigh the cognitive overload it purportedly causes. Also, I’m not completely sold on the Stroop Effect theory about syntax highlighting.

Also, I would say it depends on your colorscheme. Some are definitely garish and hard to read, but schemes like solarized, gruvbox, and whatever GitHub uses seem to be easy to read.

I agree, but sometimes there is a thing like too much syntax highlighting though. At some point, adding an extra color for another type of element is just like adding noise.

Pretty much!

“Hey look at me; my brain evolved sections which are capable of assigning meaning to color subconsciously, but I’m going to offload all the work they’re doing to my conscious mind because it makes me feel tough.”

I wonder if how distracting the highlighting is depends on what language you’re using. I mainly write Clojure, so the structure is more explicit, with the colours pretty much only indicating the type of elements (e.g. numbers are purple, strings are green, functions are yellow). Maybe if you’re writing in a more C-like language the highlighting is less useful or more distracting?

When I spent time in Eclipse, I used proportional fonts and absolutely loved it. Now I’m back in vim and it’s the only thing I miss.

I really like Unite; I switched to it a month or two ago and was able to replace several other plugins I’d been using with just the one.