I think you confuse beliefs with values by placing that at the root.
I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.
People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.
It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.
A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.
Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.
Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.
By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.
The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.
Many, many years ago I was a dedicated Emacs user.
My recollection is that there was a very lightweight binary that would launch a single window utilising an existing Emacs process that (of course) you usually alrwady had running, to show a dedicated window for editing a single file - which is Notepad's raison d'etre. So as a Notepad replacement I can't really see a place in the world for something like this.
I am not in any way competent to comment on CJK issues in Emacs as I can't do any of those languages. I can appreciate the desire to address those.
To answer OP's question, I doubt there is much demand for a knobbled Emacs like this, but on the other hand, I think you should do open source software primarily for yourself because doing it for others' sake will grind you down. But if what really pleases you is to make an impact for a lot of other people, directing your energies into solving CJK issues in Emacs itself would be a lot more impactful (though I am sure a lot more challenging too).
Thank you for the thoughtful comment and advice! The lightweight binary you mentioned is likely emacsclient, which is indeed a good way to use a running Emacs process as a quick editor.
You are right that if elecxzy were just for editing a single file, it might not offer much over a standard Notepad. However, the real value I wanted to achieve is the ability to view, edit, and integrate multiple sources using muscle memory, without touching the mouse.
While it runs as a simple standalone window, it supports Emacs window splitting commands like C-x 2, C-x 3, and C-x 1.
As for contributing to the upstream Emacs to fix CJK issues, I agree that it would be a more impactful approach for the community. But I really appreciate your advice about doing software for myself. I will continue to work on this project for my own use and enjoyment. Thank you for the great advice!
The bad thing about these sort of tools is when you work in a shop where multiple platforms are used for development and one of the platforms doesn't support the tool, or the tool fights with other tooling on that platform. You should for example never use pre-commit to enforce line ending style because git has brain dead defaults (which is to say, unless you have a .gitsettings file in your repo to prevent it, it will change line endings itself, fighting pre-commit). This just creates confusion and wasted time. In aid of what? So some anal so-and-so can get their way about code formatting as though it makes everyone else more productive to format code THEIR way. When in fact it makes others LESS productive as they fight "computer says no" format-nazi jobs in CI that don't even report what is "wrong" with the formatting and rely on tooling that they don't have installed to run locally.
Not to mention the overhead of running these worthless inefficient tools on every commit (even locally).
Tools like this just raise the debate from different opinions about formatting to different opinions about workflows. Workflows impact productivity a lot more than formatting.
Very interesting take that is probably true in my experience. (And not to say I doubt you at all but would be interested in a citation for that correlation.)
I think also that bright people like to solve problems, and not all bright people consider complexity a problem - and indeed, whether the intent is consciously there or not, it provides future opportunities to solve tricky problems!
In the context of scrum, with short sprints aimed at delivering immediate business value, it's challenging to make simplifications that have positive value in the long term, especially when you're unsure at the outset whether such simplifications are even possible. Meanwhile if you got the desired outputs from the specified inputs, you had a fun enough time conquering the complexity and you can get a pat on the back and move on to the next challenge.
My theory is that an org works best with both types of personalities, and if it knows what's good for it (especially if it's bought into scrum) knows who its best refiners and simplifiers are and lets them have at that kind of work while others concentrate on the immediate delivery pressures (usually more junior engineers but sometimes also just career specialists in fast delivery whatever the complexity cost).
I have respect for all these people as long as they have respect for each other.
Mostly pretty sound advice here, but oh, this rankles! --
"In situations where bugs aren’t mission critical (ex. 99% of web apps), you’re going to get further with shipping fast and fixing bugs fast, than taking the time to make sure you’re shipping pristine features on your first try."
In 99% of web apps, your end users have no possible way of telling you that you shipped a bug, and your bug will remain there forever, frustrating users and losing your client money as they abandon your site. Telemetry won't help you either becuase you'll misunderstand the observations it provides.
That makes much of the sword part of the ceremony, but surely it's the "red cord raised by City police" that signifies some self-authority -- what other part of the country may purposefully and physically stop the monarch and receive no investigation or punishment?
For direct user interactions (such as opening a combo box) the threshold of perception is actually much closer to 30ms than 300ms. 300ms is usable but far from a pleasure to use.
I found myself interacting with a Windows Server 2008 VM the other day (don't ask!) and was astonished how snappy the UI was, relative to today's machines (Windows or Mac).
I strongly disagree on this. If a search with no results costs them about the same amount of compute as one with results, then satisfying that requirement would give them a commercial incentive to lie to you about whether they have any good results for you, and to waste your time scrolling through bad results. Your time doing so is almost certainly worth more than what the search itself cost you.
I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.
People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.
It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.
A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.
Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.
Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.
By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.
The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.
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