ten-thousand-times

A journal entry has arrived!

I’ve decided to maybe do some writing, spasming out into the void my thoughts about all sorts of things. I’ve tried to do this in the past, and have generally petered out, but maybe this time will be different?

Old Software

Newer isn’t always better. I’m often struck by people who spend their time searching for new software to do a task. As if changing tools will somehow make them achieve more. I work with people who try new terminal emulators weekly, who fiddle with plugins for their IDEs, who are always on the hunt for new whizbangs. But not me. Here’s some “old” things I still use, and still perform all the tasks newer alternatives do.

• vim - not neovim, or a vim keymap plugin for an IDE. I use “classic vim”, and furthermore, I do it without hundreds of plugins. ALE for just in time linting, polyglot for more modern updated language packs, and signify for version control marking of in progress work.
• GNU Screen - rather than more modern alternatives like byobu or tmux. All of these are fine, but I built up my screen skills in a world where I was working across 5+ differen Unix environments, and screen was everywhere. I don’t need complex window splitting - I just use fullscreen windows 99% of the time.
• bash as opposed to the more popular zsh or fish shells. Once again this is a bit more about muscle memory - I learned the ins and outs of bash and didn’t need anything beyond it. Many people switched to zsh for the completion capabilities, but I found bash-completion to be suffient for my needs. The added bonus here is that any sort of shell scripting you do is almost always bash or sh compatible, so working in the very shell you script allows for skill transferrence.
• Lastly, I heavily use shell tools in place of a full blown IDE. I do not have file browsing integrated in vim, nor build helpers, and things of the sort. I edit a file, quit out of vim, run shell commands, etc. If I need to find something in the codebase, grep works fine. If I need to replace something, I can throw sed into the mix too.

Quiet Things

The Last Quiet Thing is a very compelling piece about how almost all modern technology constantly pesters and asks of us. Look at me! Pay attention! Me me me! And yet our lives aren’t better for it. We’re more stressed, because all our stuff takes our attention.

I like these “quiet things”. It’s a good perspective. It makes me think about my recent xteink purchase - it’s a small ereader that does next to nothing - you put epub files on it and read. No syncing of public ratings or highlight or comments or keeping track of what you’re reading, while asking you to review the book. It doesn’t pester.

Closing Thoughts?

I dunno, I feel like I need some sort of conclusion here. I’m not sure if writing will become a thing for me again, or not. But here’s to hoping…