This is pretty cool and definitely has use, but IIUC this is strictly a free forwarding address, right? I don’t think it tries to compete with Proton Mail or Tuta Mail.

Thank you for raising this point.

Are there even other privacy-respecting email providers that are fit for the job? I’m genuinely curious.

Thank you so much for your elaborate and well-articulated reply! As I don’t want these messages to spiral into an ever-expanding wall of text, I’ve chosen to refrain from reacting to every single valuable thing you’ve written. Nonetheless, everything, including the parts I’m explicitly not reacting to, has been a joy to read and has been very informative. So, again, thank you! Much appreciated!

Which alternate layout are you considering?

Hehe, currently, I’ve landed on Night.

I recommend grabbing something you typed and feeding it here to check heat map of keypresses you would have done to have some visual representation of your usage.

This is pretty cool! Unfortunately, (perhaps unsurprisingly) Night isn’t included within its layout options. I would otherwise have loved to check this out.

switch stuff on the early signals because that first wrist pain was an eye opener on how bad things can get if you ignore them.

Would you like to elaborate on this? As the pains and discomfort have increased over time, I have been more conscious than previously. But, I’m sure there’s still a lot of mileage to be had. Like, what do you perceive as an early signal? Exhaustion and/or fatigue after a day of work? Or perhaps something more specific?

Furthermore, how bad did things become?

Do you feel pain now though?

After a couple of hours, I do experience strange sensations that border on pain. Furthermore, there’s (almost) always some level of unease/discomfort. Thankfully, resting continues to feel good and I get especially revitalized after sleeping well. But I acknowledge that this isn’t sustainable.

If so what?

Wrist pain and fingers that feel wacky. So, this is basically carpal tunnel 101. This has been confirmed/diagnosed by both the general practioner as well as the surgeon. Thankfully, the damage is relatively tame still; the surgeon didn’t see much distortion/damage in the x-rays (yet). There’s also no need (yet) for a surgery and (hopefully) there’ll never be. Which is very much reliant on me putting in the work and effort to make this as comfortable and (by extension) sustainable as possible.

You should address that immediately. At most points I would have answered that I felt no pain with my setup, because those things build up gradually, if you’re at the point of feeling pain the time to take action is now.

I have taken some action; but I’m still very much in the process. I’m aware it’s just not enough (yet). But, the steps I’ve taken so far have thankfully led to significant relieve already. Like, I was a lot worse last year. And, as hinted at previously, I already have plans to address the remaining issues.

my point is that the plugin ecosystem for it might be a bit less extensive, and not sure how to set shortcuts that use vim key bindings for other plugins.

You could be right on the plugin ecosystem; even beyond the integration of evil-mode*. It doesn’t matter which metric I throw at it, the Neovim ecosystem seems to be more vibrant. Though, at least for the time being, org-mode seems to be Emacs’ forte. Which…, just happens to be the very thing I’m using it mostly for. While I’m far from being comfortable with it, it has already provided a much better experience compared to all other text editors I’ve tried.

I would only try out Emacs or Neovim through a opinionated config.

Why?

My apologies, perhaps I should have been clearer. I didn’t stress enough how this was mostly for trying it out and get going initially. I’m still on Doom Emacs, but I do intend to build my own config after I’ve gotten a better grasp IF it’s beneficial.

And that’s another point for Nvim for me, their configs are very easy, I followed this guide and had a working config that I could easily expand in no time.

Hahaha 🤣, I would have loved to have an up-to-date video guide like that for Emacs. Alas… 😅.

I miss org-mode

Hehe 😜, though I wonder: have you tried out Neorg or nvim-orgmode to see how they fare by comparison?

Virtual Machine Manager’s GitHub page for its flatpak includes the following lines:

NOTE: By default, this Flatpak only includes the Virtual Machine Manager client application and does not include the libvirt daemon or QEMU. Depending on your use case, you may have to install other applications or extensions:

• Connecting to a remote libvirt instance: nothing else needed
• Connecting to a libvirt system instance: make sure that libvirtd is installed on the host, either via your package manager or using a system extension on image based systems for example
• Connecting to a libvirt user instance: install the QEMU extension using flatpak install org.virt_manager.virt_manager.Extension.Qemu

So, in this case, have you either installed libvirtd on the host^[1] (i.e. have you installed it with rpm-ostree) OR have you installed the QEMU extension as per its own instruction?

If neither, then you should at least do one of them and report back.

EDIT: While what’s written above remains relevant beyond Bazzite, Bazzite’s ujust scripts do provide handholds for a myriad of situations including this one:

• (Step 0: Uninstall^[2] the flatpak of Virtual Machine Manager)
• Step 1: Install Virtual Machine Manager with ujust, i.e. invoke the ujust setup-virtualization command

I suppose the ujust way handles a bunch of gotchas you’d otherwise have to tackle yourself. And, thus, is most likely preferred over all other methods.

As a side note, please consider consulting Bazzite’s excellent documentation first. We’ll be more than happy to help out regardless, but I’m sure there are a bunch of gems you’ll be missing out on otherwise.

Hey, yeah, I know the feeling, every time I lose an already typed reply I completely lose motivation to rewrite it.

Hehe, as a precaution, I wrote this up in Emacs instead 😜.

Yeah, my pinky strain issue is completely gone

Glad to hear that!

Using i3/sway as my WM for a keyboard centric usage

Curious to see this at the very top of your list. Perhaps I should make my switch to Sway rather sooner than later. Thank you for the endorsement!

learning touch typing properly

I intend to learn this with the alt keyboard layout after the more ergonomic split keyboard has arrived. Wish me good luck 😉!

Trackball instead of mouse

Hmm…, this is lower on your list. So I suppose that by effectively removing most need for a mouse, the switch to a trackball has been less impactful. Btw, perhaps related, would you happen to be aware of hints? If so, could you touch upon its relevance?

a good chair to prevent issues with my back

Curious. Is this a special ergonomic chair (or something)?

It was a slow process of making one change here, few months later another z etc

Did you advance/progress in increments because you were testing out the latest addition to the setup? And thus, only introduced a subsequent change after judging that you were not ‘done’ yet?

all of my pains in wrist, lower back, neck, etc have disappeared.

I am so glad to read this! While the journey until I am able to interact with my systems without any pain seems far away right now, success stories like yours make me so pumped to pull through.

I figured if I’m going to ve sitting in front of a computer typing stuff for 8h a day I need to make that as comfortable as possible to be able to do it for longer.

Couldn’t agree more.

e.g. <space>srq" (Surround Replace Quotes with ") to replace the next quotes for " (e.g. changing var = 'some text' to var = "some text"). That same plugin allows me to also do <space>srb[ to Surround Replace Bracket/Braces with [ (to change the surrounding [, (, or { to [ ).

Interesting. FWIW, I did test this out and I believe that OOTB Doom Emacs does utilize the evil-surround package. However, I don’t think it’s as powerful as what you describe. Though, this could also be on me 😅.

Another plugin allows me to move to any part of the screen in 4 keystrokes, I press s the two characters of where I want to move, and a third disambiguation character and the cursor moves there.

Hmm…, this very closely resembles what evil-snipe does. Though, unless I’m doing something wrong, the functionality is not a single s away, but rather a g s SPC away. At least, OOTB*.

May I ask why emacs in evil-mode instead of Nvim?

Of course you can. Unfortunately, though, I don’t exactly recall my reasonings 😅. Thankfully, I did note some of my thoughts from back when I was actively trying to decide between the two. From there, I was able to gather the following:

• I would only try out Emacs or Neovim through a opinionated config.
• For Emacs, Doom had kinda won over Spacemacs based on the opinions (and experiences) of others . Though, I still wanted to try out Spacemacs to judge for myself.
• While for Neovim, LazyVim and LunarVim were the winning configs.

What follows is not based on my notes, but from what I can remember. Shortly after I came to the above conclusions, I went out and tried to install them. But, I wanted to ‘test’ them without ‘polluting’ my system. As such, I tried to install them within a distrobox. This is where Neovim came short because of this imposed limitation. I don’t 100% remember what it was, but IIRC there might have been more than 1 issue; one of which had to do with fonts. Regardless, my Neovim adventures were prematurely terminated 😅. By contrast, Emacs didn’t budge an inch under these circumstances. So I was able to test out both Doom and Spacemacs without any significant issues. Since then, I have dabbled in Emacs. But the folding mentioned in the original post is what has led me to commit more seriously than ever. So, in short, it was mostly out of practical reasons.

Btw, it’s funny, but most of what you just read about my reasonings were buried memories 😂. Like, if I had to answer it on the spot -so without thinking it over or look through my notes or dig through my memories- , I would probably have stated some arbitrary technical reason (e.g. org-mode FTW) OR its proven longevity OR I don’t know… something. But it couldn’t be further from the truth 😅. Granted, I’m still very much enjoying Emacs. But, I shouldn’t disregard/dismiss Neovim any longer. It’s time to revisit this rabbit hole 😂. I should also thank you for asking the question that brought this to my attention 😊!

I like stability and cleanliness. Security by default. Least mental load possible long-term.

Excellent breakdown of your desires! FWIW, I definitely resonate with these as well.

I’m currently testing out NIXos. Next will be VanillaOS, 3rd will be Fedora Silverblue.

One simply can’t ignore the fact that these are so-called atomic distros. Which makes a ton of sense considering what you set out for. FWIW, my personal takes on the individual projects are as follows:

• NixOS is pretty excellent. If the epitome of cleanliness is reached with becoming stateless, then there’s simply no other viable alternative.
• For VanillaOS, I feel it has yet to fully realize its promise. Or, at least, hasn’t fulfilled whatever’s required to break into the (relative) ‘mainstream’ for one reason or another.
• Fedora Silverblue has been my daily-driver in some shape or form over the last three years 😅. As such, I’m clearly biased. However, I’d reckon secureblue, i.e. a derivative that goes all-in on security, is actually more interesting for you.

Anyone have good recommendations? Easy backups, stability, security first posture, least maintenance and memory load. I hate getting scattered in symlinks, scripts, and filesystem placing.

Honestly, with Fedora Atomic and Nixos, you’re already considering the very best at the job. Though, for completeness’ sake, consider looking into openSUSE Aeon as well. While I’d argue the other two are currently more interesting, I wouldn’t want to dismiss it altogether.

Beyond these, we find some other distros that miss something crucial for them to be considered a legit candidate/alternative:

• Guix System can put up a decent fight against NixOS and may even sway you over if you’re into lisp. Unfortunately, though, it has yet to receive what flakes brought to the table for NixOS. Don’t get me wrong; Guix’ implementation of channels is vastly superior over Nix’ and therefore Guix System doesn’t gain as much from its (to be) flake counterpart. However, with flakes, NixOS becomes pretty smooth sailing. Like, you can just trust it to work reliably. With Guix, however, it can get ugly sometimes. Which can even lead the biggest Guix proponents back to NixOS…
• Kicksecure is another hardened-by-default distro worth mentioning. Sadly, unlike secureblue, it does nothing with atomicity.

What are some pros and cons of different distros?

This is too broad of a question 😅. If possible, narrow it down to some face-offs you’re particularly interested in. After which I will try to help out if I can. Btw, I ‘found’ this comment that attempts to assign tiers to distros in terms of how they fare security-wise.

What do you daily drive as a power user?

Without going over what a power user is and/or if I would even qualify as such, I’ve been daily-driving secureblue for over a year now.

Give me your thoughts and recommendations! Thanks.

At this point, I think both NixOS and secureblue pose as the most interesting candidates for ya. The former peaks in cleanliness, while the latter peaks in security.

Sorry fam for the late response! I was writing up a draft a couple of days ago, but that one somehow disappeared. Which…, is kinda peculiar as I don’t recall the last time a draft spoofed out of existence. Regardless, it really puts me off to start a reply all over. As such, I’ve been mustering motivation since 😅. Anyhow, thank you for your patience!

Thank you (also) for sharing your journey around the many text editors! If anything, it reminds me how life has got many surprises for us. As such, being wed to any software, regardless of how powerful it may be, may still result in a break later down the line.

Thank you (once more) for touching on ergonomics! I haven’t mentioned it, but I do experience some RSI-related pains/aches.

Anyhow, I do have concerns on how Emacs’ default keybindings might be detrimental on someone using a regular keyboard. I believe this article makes an interesting case on this. That’s also one of the reasons why I’ve (almost) exclusively been on evil mode.

I hope you’ve recovered completely from the strain on your pinky! And, hopefully, nothing else has been causing any issues since!

Btw, the trick with ci" and ca" is pretty cool! Thank you for teaching me something new! FWIW, it was reproducible within Emacs’ evil mode*.

Could you elaborate on the reform?

For some reason, I was under the impression that laptops in the MNT Reform series were the only laptops that were manufactured using open (source) hardware only. Or, if there were others, that it must have been doing something so special that they deserved to be put on a pedestal. But, currently, I don’t feel confident enough to state why it would be superior over say the Olimex TERES-I or Pinebook Pro.

I hear the hype yet to me it looks like a severely overpriced tv box with some low-grade peripherials strapped to it in the least space efficient way possible.

We definitely pay a premium, but I don’t know exactly why. Especially when the aforementioned Olimex TERES-I and Pinebook Pro are almost an order of magnitude cheaper.

Did they got rockchip to release sources instead of blobs or something?

From what I understood, Rockchip offers (at least some of) its SoCs as open source hardware. So, what MNT Reform did for the SoC is order them as open source hardware and include/publicize/provide all the schematics (etc).

What is the praise actually for?

FWIW, the open source hardware aspect is what I was intrigued by*.

No worries, fam! And thank you for clarifying! Based on your answer, I’ll assume that Konsole should suit you more than well for the time being. The moment you’re starting to ‘live’ inside a terminal is when looking elsewhere for something more advanced and/or powerful starts to make a lot more sense.

I’ll check out Warp/Wave, thanks!

Aight. Glad to hear that you’re interested! Have a good one, fam 😉.

Hehe, you read right through me 😂. Thanks fam for the heads up!

Anyhow, I’ve learned so much from you and I really appreciate that. Again, wholeheartedly, thank you!

Wish ya a good one 😉!

I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy.

OP, to be frank, descriptions like “general terminal stuff” and “nothing terribly fancy” are too generic to be useful here. Though, I suppose this is simply indicative that you’re (probably) perfectly served (as is) by Konsole.

what do you folks use

Ptyxis

and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?

Because it came with the distro and I had no need for something different.

One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.

Unsure if I understood you correctly, but perhaps Warp and Wave are worth looking into for ya.

I got a couple I really like, though for vastly different reasons:

• The MNT Reform series takes the crown for their commitment towards open source software AND open source hardware.
• The ASUS Zenbook DUO is an early entry in the direction of what I perceive as peak design. This technology will only improve from here and I hope other vendors will take cues from this one.

Aight. Anyhow, this has been a lovely conversation fam! Thanks for your contributions!

Aight. This conversation has been much appreciated, thanks fam!

Perhaps I might have to give ed a go at some point if I find myself hacking more with elisp rather than outputting actual productive work. But, at least for now, this is (thankfully) not really a concern for mine 😜.

As for Sam, I should either install a different OS (i.e. 9front) for the truely special experience. Or…, build it (myself) with plan9port. Did I get that right?

Curiously, the cream of the crop in terms of security-focused Linux (i.e. Kicksecure and secureblue) leverage systemd to their benefit.

UPDATE: For posterity’s sake, I’d like to reflect on the last couple of days.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone that has contributed to the discussion! Were it not for your recommendations/suggestions/endorsements, then I might not have found a valid alternative.

Secondly, I’ve taken every single recommendation pretty seriously. As such, I’ve either installed them to see for myself if I was able to reproduce the functionality found in the gif found above. Or, didn’t install them to begin with due to the suggested installation methods not passing through my (rather) strict policy on software. Regardless, in the end, I’ve only found two pieces of software that satisfied the bill: Kate and KDevelop.

KDevelop is pretty cool, but is more of an IDE rather than a text editor. As such, I’ve landed on Kate.

But, perhaps more than anything, I’ve come to really appreciate Emacs (and Neovim). And, perhaps more than ever, I feel ready to take them on 💪. Wish me luck 😊.

Thank you for the raving endorsement and otherwise very informative reply!

Also I have migrated from Emacs to Nvim, the reasons are purely ergonomical (pinky fatigue is a real issue) but after switching I found a jump in the way to think about an editor. Emacs is great, don’t get me wrong, and if you decide to learn Emacs I can assure you it will be the best editor you’ve used, but it still edits things at a character level, while there are concepts for matching brackets or quotes changing the text inside quotes in Emacs is very character oriented, I.e. go to start of quote, start marking, move to matching quote, delete, whereas in vim is sort of a higher level language where you say Change Inside Next Quote using cin", and expanded with some plugins you can even do srnq' to Surround Replace Next Quote with ’ (which will change the quotations on the next text from whatever to '). And that’s a lot closer to the way I think so it skips a mental step (plus it’s a lot less keystrokes and no Ctrl for my pinky).

Hmm…, interesting. I’m still pretty new to evil-mode, but doesn’t that bridge the gap here? Btw, I don’t know why, but I wasn’t able to see for myself how cin" worked within Vim*.

Ah xD, no problem fam! Please keep us updated :P .

I have looked into plugins, but nothing I’ve found suggests to contain/offer the desired functionality.

Thank you so much for this information! It confirms that Kate is very competent, yet clears where it may fall short compared to Zed.

Aight, I’ll keep Kate around for the time being. And I’ll definitely take Zed into consideration whenever I’m in search of an IDE.