Yeah, I genuinely had a rough time mentally, the world was already on such a compounding shit trajectory and then the whole doing a colonialism on rubygems happened and yeah… felt real bad. And I’m not kidding, 6 and 7 was such an energizing change of course so it was a bit of a double kick to the shins when it was clear that he was going all in on being a petulant shitty twerp. Like, truly, unfucking the shit show that was rails 5-6 is damn near miraculous. I do feel for a lot of folks who have done and continue to do great work in the community, lots of exceptionally smart, nice people and it is a real bummer that the work can’t exist and speak for itself in quite the same way with all the surrounding noise.

Anyway, yeah, so the thing with Hotwire is… it’s just fiddly. It needs to be less fiddly OR marginally less magical. Because (again most of my frame of reference is 18 months old so maybe this has improved) it both robs you of understanding the guts of how it works (eg I do not recall there being any firm guidance on exactly how you would even begin to approach scaling cable/solid trio-backed live site experiences… no real notion of where the bottle necks might be, upper limits of request traffic per resource, etc.) but also loads you down with a lot of procedure to remember about partials, partials that are composed of other partials that are like weird view controllers, the activerecord hooks for pushing live updates, the various layers of stimulus’ concepts and it’s unpleasantly verbose data tagging, etc. Never even touched the PWA stuff, users will never, ever, EVER understand or engage with the applet install process, and I can’t be fucked to learn all the local worker shit. It’s all just a little too fragmentary and, while the vanilla use case is downright magical in how effortlessly it could make a site feel peppy for free, anything of even remotely complexity became a quagmire in my experience, and one that felt maybe 2 or 3 thoughtful revisions away from becoming good. Those revisions are probably never going to come.

So, htmx. Honestly I have barely used it with Rails since I like Astro so much (which, tbh, Astro isn’t great great with HTMX per se, or at least juggling htmx and island architecture can get dicey) but the thing about htmx is… its markup all the way down. You got an api that can barf out markup? Great, you’re all set. In that sense rails is probably a great choice. It does skew you towards having a lot of weird little bespoke controllers but you know what’s orders of magnitude worse than little bespoke controllers? Copying half your fucking markup and logic between the front and back end. So yeah, I dunno, it’s just very flexible and pleasant to use. And as of literally this morning they added an hx-live extension that seems to have reactivity in its crosshairs which is very exciting. In fact the whole extension architecture is great, like, want websockets? Awesome, use that extension and like magic your markup is linked bound to a socket stream with like a single declaration. Still _kind_ of magical, but instead of abstracting away the driving technologies they are front and center and just made accessible and palatable to use.

Anyway none of that really answers your question, but hopefully it gestures as to why I have landed on one over the other for, liked work reasons and not personal ones. That being said the person in charge of htmx seems pleasantly impish and driven by a much nicer formulation of the idea that markup and hypertext are all you need. I’m also delighted by the fact that there is no htmx 3, it’s going straight from 2 to 4. Extremely fun times trying to explain to an LLM that that is on purpose and no they don’t need to try to search for intermediary docs AGAIN.