Brand as immersive power-up

[digitalextremist]

Copied here from https://github.com/zedless-editor/zedless/issues/49#issuecomment-3544697114 written by @ItsHarper

Side note that you're free to ignore

I'm also not sure what the point is of a fork that changes the branding without any meaningful changes. I can only really see a couple of possible outcomes:
No one uses it
You manage to gather a group of people who prefer your branding, and a community that barely even exists risks ending up being split
a. It also becomes harder for people to find resources because not everyone is searching for the same name
If you're looking to build a community of people with a similar outlook on software to you, wouldn't it be more impactful to spend time finding (or writing!) additional software that matches your philosophy, and building a place for like-minded people to find that curated software in one place?

Obviously you can do that and still fork zedless, but while I do appreciate whimsy, I personally think a fork that is merely more whimsically-branded (for lack of a better term) could end up doing more harm than good. 🤷

On the other hand, if you are planning functional changes, it seems better to try to get them into Zedless so that everyone can benefit (unless it becomes clear that the kinds of changes you want won't be accepted).

[digitalextremist]

I see brand-as-abstraction-layer and brand-as-story-access-point as both being brand-as-immersive-power-up.

Especially after being very nastily handled by Zed Industries, Inc. myself, while also probably beating it to death within the top 100 or top 10 in terms of strain placed on the system... I somewhat abstracted the IDE as no longer a particular application, and more of a set of expectations. I kind of no longer see an IDE at all. I hit a wall at mach 5 and never wanted that to happen again, but also noticed something deeper break in the process since I ran into something cold and ruined over there. That is the antithesis of why one ought to become a programmer and push the limits of what can be accomplished.

That IDE disappearance is pretty much ideal, as with "become one with the sword" versus constantly have the felt-sense of "I am sword fighting" in a very obnoxious way, or even in a subtle way. I would rather code, rather than look at coding.

Right now Zedless is within that range, #44 memory-tripling notwithstanding, which is likely handled by later Zed releases. But there are other IDEs popping up now since slop is becoming prevalent.

As mentioned in #49 I am not getting into Rust right now, but if I were making improvements I would contribute here.

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After brand-as-abstraction-layer, then the deeper reason is brand-as-storyscape... then brand-as-immersive power-up stands. Like check out the entire concept of this band as a reference point, and this session, and when it was recorded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cAq3MfueO4

That was serious. And the mythological backdrop of so many franchises just petered out at programming itself? We had epics for pretty much every other way of life by comparison... but not the one that makes all the other possible?! That is where I started from and the goal was to remove the cold ruined dead rotted core and just walk it off, and be campaign oriented rather than project oriented.

My time-window on this is not in the immediate, and not limited to small numbers. But on the point of "why not write your own" that is definitely the objective, within the system being developed itself. And being campaign oriented it would be possible to invite contribution on Zedless so recursively speaking, my fork might end up contributing back rather than folding into our own ecosystem fully.

I would not leave Zedless "because we have our own" but only if ours were actually better. I am not totally happy with the idea of having the same ecosystem develop its own IDE, same as with Gitea or at least version control, with 'issues' abstracted out and tracked in different primitives linked to commit messages.

Being awesome is its own reward and having even 0.001% awesome missing is extremely painful at high speed, with everything on the line on some or all levels, and with all authentic individuality invested in this one choke point called an IDE. Being awesome is a humble practice of many other arts and for programming to attain to that it cannot have random names and nonsense aspects that are arbitrary. That is still an early-stage mindset compared to where we will be if we get it together.

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Having a tailwind in code is possible with more than just performance tuning and learning special keystrokes and habits. Some of it happens by be totally at one with your environment and being able to push past your own limits as a self because you never hit any kind of wall, whether aesthetically or practically or any other way.

Reaching that "all aspects at same level of awesome" without compromise is on my horizon... but first, I let go of the entire thing and do my own actual job and let the success of that spill over into the culture being ready to get some attention. That is the natural move in pretty much all story-arcs in terms of one major hit leading to another context hit, i.e. Linux->Git. I would name others but there would be yet another flamewar waiting to happen just sitting there on the internet 😆