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Comment by TigeriusKirk | Hacker News Reader

One good thing about the old (?) model of installing software on your pc rather than subscribing to software was you could just keep using the version you liked as long as you liked. You might eventually face an upgrade that offered a bug fix or a new feature you really wanted, but the hard choice was in your hands.

If you wanted to move slowly (or not at all), at least you had the option.

There's still people writing books on WordStar. People still running small businesses on 1990s era Peachtree Accounting on DOS. Maybe they'd benefit from new software, but honestly probably not all that much from their viewpoint.

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Yeah, this is one of the reasons I use emacs and have completely ignored atom, vscode, etc - I’m pretty sure that my customizations and most of what I learn now will still be applicable in 10 years.

That's a reason not to use a closed source IDE like JetBrains, but where VSCode is open source, as is Atom, it's a bit less applicable.

If your don't want to, you don't have to upgrade your Jetbrains IDEs, so that seems more in line with the old "upgrade when you want to" mode. Except for licencing, of course.

Though specifically with Jetbrains, I fine that their upgrades almost always either make things better or don't get in my way.

Eh I really don't want to have to fight against the happy path on VSCode, even if I could maintain my own fork, or whatever, and try to hold it in stasis. Emacs core is pretty fully baked at this point, and it just works on basically everything I throw at it.

While the emacs package landscape is also changing at a rapid pace, this is also one reason of why I'm more and more getting into vim, emacs and Linux command line tools: They have been around for a long time and will be around for much longer, most likely only getting incremental changes.

I guess this is another great feature of community-maintained open source tools vs commercial software: A slower rate of change because nobody has to prove anything to anyone by adding tons of features and redesigning the UI.

Yeah but as soon as you work with other people who use newer versions of the software then either you need to get them to export in an old format each time, which they will find annoying, or you need to update the software just so you can open the files that they send you.

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