With compress=zstd ZFS reports a 1.30 compression ratio on my Steam dataset, compressing it from ~1.2TB (reported by the file manager) down to 904GB (reported by zfs list -o name,usedds). Pretty good I think.
Obviously it depends on the games. AAA crap will probably add tens/hundreds of GBs of pre-compressed asset blobs, while indie and older games will often have more loose file structures with config files, scripts, runtimes etc. that all compress extremely well. And with older games, even when compressed the algorithms are often far from ideal and zstd can still get a few more percent out of them.


Also note that modal editing isn’t for everyone. I’m happy to learn hotkeys, I even got far enough to build musclememory for vim’s normal mode. What never went away though was my confusion about what mode the editor is in. I would constantly input text in normal mode and input commands in insert mode, leading to costly mistakes that tore down any speed advantage vim would have given me. I really tried, but never built muscle memory for this kind of context switching[1], maybe it’s an ADHD thing.
These days I’m on Emacs with an always improving custom command scheme of non-modal but context sensitive commands that do similar things in all major and minor modes.
Same situation with tmux which is almost a requirement for the typical vim workflow, and adds another layer of mode switching on top. On Emacs window management is included and so are remote shells/editing, so no need for the tmux<->editor context switch. ↩︎