For a while now I have used VSCodium- which is just Microsoft's VSCode, but with as much of the telemetry stripped out (or rather, not built-in in the first place) as possible- but I've found myself with a desire to move away from Electron-based apps for a number of reasons.

Primarily, I'm ideologically opposed to the trend in which everything is an Electron-based web app packaged as a "desktop application", but on a slightly more functional note, Electron seems to behave poorly in Wayland contexts, especially on Arm64 devices.

In terms of feature set, I'm not too interested in complexity. Something open-source, relatively clean / light-weight, capable of providing a project overview and a number of tabbed or vsplit / hsplit buffers. Something with comprehensive syntax highlighting and some form of language server interface. Something theme-able, and good to look at, with relatively intuitive or well-established keyboard shortcuts. I don't much care for integrated terminals, extensive debugging tooling, or any form of built-in AI assistant.

I have been trying out Micro, with a set of plugins which allow for a project overview, a language server, and a number of other QOL improvements, but it has a list of breaking issues that will likely not be solved for years given the speed at which pull-requests are addressed, if at all. Even so- it hits most of the marks that I find most important to me.

But I'm also interested in what other people use; what other programmers find matter to them. So what text editors, or IDEs do you swear by (and please don't suggest VIM- it's overwhelming ;])?

I heavily utilize ChatGPT to generate .ics files to populate my Apple Calendar with various events, but I have been wanting to upgrade my time management and also use the Reminders app.

I recently used ChatGPT to help me populate a Trello board with tasks associated with a project I am working on, but I was getting annoyed with having my workflow split across Apple Calendar and Trello. I exported my Trello board as a CSV and was trying to have ChatGPT turn it into a file I could import into Reminders, but as it turns out, this is not easy.

.ics files do contain syntax for reminders tasks with due dates that populate the Apple Calendar, but generating an .ics file with only reminders tasks and importing into Calendar doesn’t actually work. Calendar recognizes that the .ics contains Reminders tasks and opens Reminders to import the tasks, but Reminders returns an error because it doesn’t support import, it only supports export to Calendar.

I found that Reminders has a Reminders.scpt dictionary file within the .app package that details .applescript commands that can create new tasks, so I fell into the world of AppleScript. The issue with AppleScript is that it was created in the 80s and hasn’t been updated since 2013. It has no native CSV support and is pretty clunky.

AppleScript does have text file support, so I was able to have ChatGPT convert my CSV into a .txt that I could parse with AppleScript. This allowed me to automate the creation of tasks in the Reminders app from my Trello CSV, but it was annoying and I still feel like there must be a better way.

Does anyone here use AppleScript regularly and know its full capabilities?

Also, are there any good resources out there for learning more about AppleScript? The Apple documentation is very out of date and it seems like more of a legacy language than something Apple regularly maintains.

Peruse this relevant meme. It depicts the magical transformation that occurs at the moment one taps the Android build number for the seventh and final time, as the arcane ritual transforms one from a chill dude in a business suit into that powerful, shadowy figure known only as "a developer".

It's a joke, obviously, but only half a joke. The "You are now a developer!" message that the developers at Google programmed your phone to display, when it grants you this set of powers that Google permitted them to program it to grant you, is doing something in the model of the world that its authors live in.

"Developer mode" isn't just for Android. The browser you are reading this in has a little panel you can open to inspect or adjust the content of the page. It's useful for things like composing humorous screenshots, deleting annoying ads, and downloading images and videos, but it's called the "Developer Tools", a set of tools defined not by what they do but by who they are intended or imagined to be doing it for. Discord has not only a "developer mode" that lets you get the permanent identifiers for messages, but also additional developer-exclusive functions that are activated by enabling the Electron developer tools and injecting code to set the isDeveloper flag. Windows has a Developer Mode. ChatGPT ~got one for some reason~ has a popular jailbreak based around convincing it that it has one. This notion that a special class of people called "developers" exist, and that they must or should be afforded extra power in our society's digital spaces, is woven into the structure of the digital environment.

Why is it like this? Big Tech doesn't give any power for free. Is it something their labor force of developers demands to be able to grant to their counterparts outside the company? Is it a Ballmer-Doctorow gambit of courting programmers as potential business customers by temporarily empowering them, before they start putting up the prices on the code signing certificates? Is it to distract and mollify hackers, to keep them from seizing similar powers in a more destabilizing way?

Is there any truth to the notion that "developers", independent of whether or not they are currently testing or programming something, are a class with different needs and rights from normal humans?