A few years ago I thought it would be nice to be able to compose an email in a new tab instead of a separate window. I found a Bugzilla entry proposing adding this to Thunderbird that had been open for several years and had had a couple community members offer to address it, look into it for a while, and ultimately give up. The way Thunderbird's UI is implemented was just too intertwined with the code to let this happen without a major re-work. I feel like this kind of a change should be easy to do in a well-designed application and likely would be for something written with technologies.
I use Thunderbird every day and am generally happy with it, but often when I come across some feature that I wish were changed and start digging into Bugzilla it becomes apparent to me that the Thunderbird codebase is old, convoluted, and difficult to work with -- the result of growing organically over many years. I could see a lot of benefits to a re-write. On the other hand, trying to match feature parity with the current version would probably take a lot more work than the author of that proposal is accounting for.
If you read the whole article, the author mixes in caveats throughout and says that it requires a special set of requirements for the usenet backup to be worthwhile. At some point, he addresses your point by saying that in some cases (possibly requiring careful coordination between all of the servers) you could backup many different servers with the same usenet account whereas services like Backblaze and Crashplan usually restrict the number of machines.
That said I still think the point you make is the most important critique. Online storage/backup is such a crowded market (Google, Amazon, DropBox, Box, Backblaze, Crashplan, Carbonite, Mozy, tarsnap, Spideroak, rsync.net, OneDrive, etc) that if you go with something significantly cheaper than all of the mainstream options you are probably going to get what you paid for.
This is the best feature of tmux. It's worth pointing out here though (in a post about making the terminal act like an IDE), that you can split the terminal into two panes so you can have an editor and a REPL open at the same time similar to many IDE's. There are even some projects that make it easy to pass code between the editor and the REPL in the other pane, though I have never gotten them to work very well.
I have followed the situation fairly closely, and I agree with your assessment. I haven't seen anything that makes me think either Pentadactyl or Vimperator will survive the deprecation of XUL. The most promising vim-like addon is VimFx (followed by the Chrome addons like Vimium and cVim which maybe will work in Firefox one day as WebExtensions -- I try on Nightly every couple months but they don't work so far). The reason I say this is that it has active development and developers committed to the WebExtensions transition (plus has less features so it is easier to port). You can follow the progress here:
I am willsALMANJ. The Pentadactyl devs never responded to repeated attempts to engage them on the continued distribution of the addon. I could have posted it to addons.mozilla.org, but it didn't feel right to package their work unchanged when they had an official account and could have done it themselves if they wanted to. I made the GitHub repo partly so that my own browsers would get the compatibility updates and partly to help out others who wanted to keep using Pentadactyl. I like keeping the working xpi available for those who want it but I don't think it is worth promoting Pentadactyl any more because it is only a matter of time before Firefox changes too much for it to keep working.
You can't categorically remap some key sequence to Escape in VimFx (not sure if you meant Vimperator where you can do this just like in vim). However, you can open the preference and add whatever alternative you want to all of the commands that are mapped to Escape by default.
This is a nice feature. The downsides compared to Vimperator/Pentadactyl is that you can tab-complete the search term and you can't get search suggestions as you type (or at least I haven't gotten either of these things to work).
I'm not sure what SPAs are or what Asana or Reviewable are, but I have happily used gmail with Pentadactyl by using passkeys. This is what I have in my passkeys setting for gmail:
On MacOS, you can use the vim mode of Karabiner. This lets you hit and hold "s" and "d" at the same time and then use h, j, k, and l as the arrow keys. Sadly I haven't found equivelents for Windows or Linux.
I switched to VimFx recently for the same reason. Actually, the ":" shortcut for the GCLI command line is a VimFx shortcut, not a standard Firefox one. The GCLI can be customized. See for example:
I added a command to toggle a preference in about:config that I switch often. It is kind of a pain to write and debug commands for the GCLI though (compared to writing javascript mapping in Pentadactyl).
It seems like this post is choosing a convenient point in time start its argument from. The reason cheap airlines like Spirit came about was because there was a market for cheaper tickets with less amenities. The post says that the major airlines lowered the prices of their lowest tier seats to match these cheap competitors, but this lowest tier had more amenities. Now the major airlines have come up with a new lowest tier of seats (basic economy) and are setting their old lowest tier (economy) back to the higher price that it used to have.
It lacks many features of Pentadactyl but covers the basics -- clicking links and text boxes with the keyboard. I have found it possible to replicate some of the things I missed from Pentadactyl through built-in features of Firefox I didn't know about (like the awesomebar filters I linked to above). Also, from using VimFx and accidentally hitting ":", i discovered the GCLI. It is a little clunky, but it is possible to define custom commands for the GCLI that have similar access to Firefox as XUL addons (and I think the GCLI is supposed to survive through WebExtensions).
I have been testing out VimFx as well (long time Pentadactyl user). I miss being able to do ":b" and quickly find open tabs, but the Firefox awesomebar has a similar functionality if you type "%". That's what I have been using. You can see more information here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
Sadly it's not realistic. Even if someone were to put in the time to make it work, Vimperator would just break again within the next year when XUL addons are deprecated in favor of WebExtensions, and unfortunately WebExtensions do not support all the features of Vimperator. You can use VimFx for now, but again it is a XUL addon and would take a massive amount of work to port to a WebExtension. Hopefully someone can get Vimium or cVim ported over as a WebExtension. I have played around some with this but haven't got it to work. It seems some of the needed API's are missing from WebExtensions at the moment.
Hmmm, after Australis changed the UI, e10s has begun to enlarge the memory footprint, XUL was ditched for Chrome extensions, and support for encrypted media extensions was added, I didn't think Firefox had much left that it could do to become more like Chrome, but I guess Mozilla is going to keep surprising us.
Yes, I work on a mixed team of physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, and the most frustrating part is trying to work with some of the physicists' code. For the most part it is fairly functional, but the problem is that it is almost unreadable. It is quite clear that they write it as fast as possible so they can do what the OP would call real work without regard for others will need to work with and maintain that code later on.
The current system of journal publication has odd incentives -- paying to be published and doing peer review for free -- and should be revised in some way. Unfortunately though the journals provide the metric by which basically all researchers are judged.
I agree that the world would be a better place if research were freely available, but the way Sci-Hub is doing this does not help the process, unless it stresses the system so bad financially that it breaks and is replaced by something else.
I have wondered about the possibility of all articles being hosted freely on sites like arxiv.org with some kind of web of trust rating system: anyone could vote up an article but people in specific fields could choose to view the aggregate rating of respected researchers in their field.
In any case, until a better rating system for researchers emerges, we can't get rid of the journal publishers.
I use Thunderbird every day and am generally happy with it, but often when I come across some feature that I wish were changed and start digging into Bugzilla it becomes apparent to me that the Thunderbird codebase is old, convoluted, and difficult to work with -- the result of growing organically over many years. I could see a lot of benefits to a re-write. On the other hand, trying to match feature parity with the current version would probably take a lot more work than the author of that proposal is accounting for.