Yup, just the other day I was talking about it on subreddit, will repeat here verbatim:
My comment is an honest reflection of long-time Emacs usage. When I started, years ago, I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that there were no tabs for every file anymore - the concept that was seemingly ingrained into my programmer's brain - almost in every IDE/editor I used before Emacs, I had tabs and a navigational panel on the side. I complained and demanded my tabs, asked on forums and called it "bullshit", when people calmly told me that I truly don't need them. Later I realized - they were right.
Slowly I learned that the wise choice is to remove any distractions - you don't need a minimap, side-panels, complicated modelines, and even line-numbers shown all the time. All that can be activated purposefully, on demand and then toggled off again. These "visual clues" are in fact not so much even distractions but micro-bombardments of your brain neurons - you think they are helping, while in fact they are slowly eating up your neural capacity, to the point that the brain just stops even paying attention to them and they become almost useless waste of your screen estate.
I'm not saying that this all generally true for every case and every user - some prefer certain ways, and it's great that we have a system that is able to satisfy any whim, but it's worth sometimes questioning yourself - am I enslaved by my own mental habits?
My comment is an honest reflection of long-time Emacs usage. When I started, years ago, I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that there were no tabs for every file anymore - the concept that was seemingly ingrained into my programmer's brain - almost in every IDE/editor I used before Emacs, I had tabs and a navigational panel on the side. I complained and demanded my tabs, asked on forums and called it "bullshit", when people calmly told me that I truly don't need them. Later I realized - they were right.
Slowly I learned that the wise choice is to remove any distractions - you don't need a minimap, side-panels, complicated modelines, and even line-numbers shown all the time. All that can be activated purposefully, on demand and then toggled off again. These "visual clues" are in fact not so much even distractions but micro-bombardments of your brain neurons - you think they are helping, while in fact they are slowly eating up your neural capacity, to the point that the brain just stops even paying attention to them and they become almost useless waste of your screen estate.
I'm not saying that this all generally true for every case and every user - some prefer certain ways, and it's great that we have a system that is able to satisfy any whim, but it's worth sometimes questioning yourself - am I enslaved by my own mental habits?