> That leads to more productivity because you adapt to the tool rather than constantly adapting the tool to you.
This is just vastly untrue.
A bespoke tool will always be more productive than a one-size-fits-most tool, and thankfully with development tools the work/time of fitting your tool is marginal to the hours you work with it, and the effort is heavily front-loaded. After a few years you have a solid setup that only requires tiny amounts of polishing every few hundred hours.
The paradox of choice is real. A well configured bespoke tool may be more efficient, but if it’s hard to reach a configuration that you like, then a non configurable tool that has well selected choices may be more efficient simply because it eliminates the time, energy and mental effort spent on configuring and thinking of configuring the tool, and trying to get comfortable with the various configurations you may tinker the tool into.
So the real correct answer to whether bespoke or pre-configured tools are more efficient is “it depends”.
> A bespoke tool will always be more productive than a one-size-fits-most tool
Others have noted the FOMO/paradox of choice issue, so I’ll list another: multi-context environments. I work in a highly collaborative environment where I need to share tools and sometimes whole machines. I rarely get to use the same configuration for any particular task. So bespoke, to me and many of my colleagues, means more stuff to learn. Standard options and configurations mean much higher levels of productivity.
This is just vastly untrue.
A bespoke tool will always be more productive than a one-size-fits-most tool, and thankfully with development tools the work/time of fitting your tool is marginal to the hours you work with it, and the effort is heavily front-loaded. After a few years you have a solid setup that only requires tiny amounts of polishing every few hundred hours.