Illusion of Customization
"Fully Customizable" is a designer's excuse.
Making a good design is hard. Big companies spend lots of resources to create good design for their apps and systems. It is a designer's job to make an setup that works out of the box, with no work for the user.
A path many developers take is to add "config files" that put the difficulty of good design onto the user, especially true for open-source where most developers know little about design. To be able to configure the software to his exact needs, a user would have to be a designer himself and know his own habits perfectly, not to mention being able to find and understand the config files. Although advanced users claim to be able to do it, they might be overestimating their own abilities to make an actually convenient and productive design even for themselves.
There is this joke about people spending more time configuring their workspace than the task they were doing it all for, and this is very much true. As a user, you should be able to identify bad "customizable software" and not waste time configuring it.
Note that being customizable and having a good design out of the box, are 2 different things, and it is important to differentiate them.
Here is a Table:
| Customizable | Good Design | Result | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | Yes | Ideal | VS Code |
| No | No | Terrible | That One Mobile App |
| No | Yes | Decent | Most Apple Products |
| Yes | No | Bad | NeoVim |
It is the developers/designers job to make sure that the software can be used without wasting time. eg. NeoVim is "fully customizable" and supposedly boosts it's users' productivity by some crazy value, but it needs to be configured using Lua (a programming language). It is nearly impossible for a beginner to figure out.
Even if the out of the box design is bad, and making a universal configuration of the software is somehow impossible, there is still a second chance. Make the settings/configuration documentation have good design. Even if the app design is a complete disaster, a good settings window might be able to save it. As long as the user can quickly arrange a convenient setup, it is probably alright.
NeoVim seems to be pretty good in this aspect (for it's terminal based nature). There is a large community publishing configurations with most plugins pre-installed so beginners have an easier time getting started. The main one is NvChad.
"Fully Customizable" should mean that the settings menu is well designed, and not that one will have to "fix the design himself." Users might as well write their own IDE at that point.
Don't fall for the Illusion of customization, don't waste your time, and don't waste other's time.
- very qualified design expert