TehPers

I would expect it to use CRLF (on Windows) for all new newlines unless I tell it otherwise. It shouldn’t try to be smart about it. It should just do exactly what I tell it to do and nothing more.

Where do you draw the line on “smart” features? Tab should not add indent spaces? Encoding or newline mechanisms? Determining EOF newline?

For a very basic default editor, I would expect it to include only what I typed, no “smart” features, no IDE features, nothing else, and use CRLF (on Windows) for newlines with at most a setting to configure it in the editor for that session.

Basically, I wouldn’t expect anything more than what nano does. If I want a fancy CLI editor, I’ll install one. At its core though, it should exist only to edit the text content of a text file and do nothing else. It should be as stable as possible, and have as little scope as possible, in my opinion.

With that said, basic text editing features, like undo/redo and cut/copy/paste would be nice. Bonus points if it even works with the system clipboard.

Edit: to add to the question of whether an automatic newline should be added, Windows has no requirement for terminating text documents with newlines, so I would not expect one. What happens in POSIX environments by tools written for those environments seems irrelevant here - if a valid text document in POSIX must be terminated by a newline, then a text editor there would naturally be expected to add one, or at least support adding one, but that has nothing to do with Windows.

The only part of this process I’d consider automating with a LLM is summarizing the changes, and even then I’d only be interested looking at a suggested changelog, not something fully automated.

It’s amazing to me how far people will go to avoid writing a simple script. Thankfully determinism isn’t a requirement for a release pipeline. You wouldn’t want all of your releases to go smoothly. That would be no fun.

This seems like the same problem that lifetimes solve in Rust - tracking when values are no longer used and thus fall “out of scope”. Automated tooling should really be doing lifetime analysis of these values, and that seems to me like it would fall well out of scope of what GenAI can be trusted to do.

If this is such a huge problem, are you able to create finalizers that close the resources instead, or better abstractions for managing the LTs of these resources? I don’t write Java anymore, but this seems like a problem better solved by other tools.