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The type of complexity that bothers me is complexity that I have to wade through on a day-to-day basis when trying to find features that I do want to use. For example, lots of menus, each with tons of menu entries and submenus. That sort of complexity won't (or at least shouldn't...) impact performance in a meaningful way, but it exacts a psychological toll on me.

As you say, Vim's complexity is different. It has a lot of nonsense built in, but unless you go looking for it you will probably not become aware of it. It also can be complex to set up correctly like you mention, but that sort of complexity bothers me much less. That's more of a "once and done" thing, which I find much more tolerable.

My tolerance for configuring software is actually very nearly pegged at zero, unless I believe that the configuration I am creating will still be useful for at least 10 years. This rules out configuring just about anything for me, with very few exceptions. My current significant configurations are for vim (the emergence of neovim gives me some concern) and zsh (aliases and basic keybindings only. I am confident that any shell I'll be using in the future will allow aliases). My window manager, browsers, etc all use their default configurations (I got burned by Awesome WM changing their configuration scheme a few years ago).

Configuring Eclipse to be tolerable is probably possible, but I have zero confidence that any such configuration could last even two or three years.




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