
Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker - wyclif
http://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/digital-minimalism-for-the-working-hacker.html
======
sk1pper
To me, true minimalism on my desktop came from stopping messing around with
different window managers, IDEs, whatever to try to maximize my experience.

Specifically, command line interfaces to Slack and GPM just add more headache
and frustration.

My setup: a terminal with tmux; Firefox; Spotify. (Recently switched from GPM,
would recommend). Stock everything except dark themes on some stuff and caps
lock->ctrl.

I don’t have some super-enlightened workflow where everything is in terminal
or has keybinds or something. But more importantly, I’m not continually
wasting time on changing my env and adding complexity.

~~~
freehunter
Learning to stop spending so much time customizing everything and work with
the defaults was one of the hardest but most productive lessons I’ve learned
over the years. I used to have a custom bashrc and custom vim and everything
on my phone was custom and I put a lot of effort into it. I even found the
perfect keyboard layout for me and switched my keyboards to that. To the point
where I couldn’t effectively use someone else’s machine.

And then I became a consultant and was logging into someone else’s machine
every day, often when I couldn’t install any customizations at all. I learned
to love bash as-is, and vim as-is. And my custom launcher stopped working, so
I switched back to the default Android launcher. And then my work gave me an
iPhone that I couldn’t customize. And suddenly I was spending more time
working and less time customizing and my productivity shot through the roof.
All I had to do was stop seeking things to make me work better and actually
just start working. And in addition to higher productivity, I now had more
free time in the day because my work got done faster.

It really is freeing in a Zen-like fashion to just use a tool as-is and not
constantly wonder how you could make it 5% better or 3% faster.

~~~
auto
The most important, non-default vim configuration for me is line numbers, and
a simple "set number" when ssh'ing onto a machine to check logs has basically
become my digital equivalent to getting a solid, familiar grip on a hammer
before swinging it.

~~~
cygned
:set rnu nu

All I need to get started.

------
b0rsuk
I thought I was alone.

Every one of us minimalists draws the line somewhere else. I like vim, Python,
Rust, RSS, web of documents rather than web of applications, static blog
generators, roguelike games, symbols and _symbolic_ graphics in computer games
and boardgames. I prefer Ultima IV graphics to Ultima V graphics , because the
latter started drawing individual torches, chairs, dishes, bushes, etc.

I'm not anti-modern. I just have an eclectic taste. I pick what I consider the
best of various areas. I dislike most social media. I would like Twitter if it
wasn't overrun by bots. I have a phone I can throw and break a window with, in
fact I fell on it from my bike and it's still okay, but my clavicle broke.
When people are starting at their smartphones I either look around (in a bus
etc), at other people, through window, or read a book. I'm saving for an E-ink
device, it's too bead the technology stagnated because of tablets and
smartphones.

I hate being labeled a luddite or cranky because I don't sheepishly run into
every innovation. Not all change is progress.

~~~
swozey
> I'm saving for an E-ink device, it's too bead the technology stagnated
> because of tablets and smartphones.

While I'm one who thinks there's always room for improvement, I've owned about
5-6 various Kindles and if you're interested in having hundreds of books on
one portable device you should just grab one.

I've got the 1st (I believe) Paperwhite and it's all I need. I've looked at
the newer Paperwhite and the Oasis but I just don't need the improvements they
offer. Any paperwhite is fantastic. The reason I did upgrade to the paperwhite
from whatever Kindle I had prior was the backlight was an absolute revolution.
I used to have a battery powered light I had to stick on my previous kindle.

The $80 for a Paperwhite is a great deal for what you get. I have 0
complaints. It could be a little faster and I prefer buying books on Amazon
from my phone or laptop (edit: and not through the Kindle directly) then
reading them on the Kindle but it's not a show stopper at all.

Also, word of advice, if you're into Audible you can often find better deals
by buying the Kindle version w/ Whispersync. I've almost bought $15-20 audible
books before then saw that the kindle book was $7 and after that purchase the
audiobook would be $3-5. It's not always the case but I can frequently find
good deals on buying both.

~~~
b0rsuk
It's more matter of lack of money than "waiting for the right one". I would
prefer a colorful screen so I can comfortably read programming books too, but
there are workarounds, like typeface trickery described in the article.

Also, I would prefer a device that isn't from Amazon. They're probably all
"made in China" anyway so any of them can be bugged, I guess...

~~~
PascLeRasc
Learn a little about electrical engineering and you can take off your tinfoil
hat about everything being "bugged"

------
sheraz
I think the author echos some things I've been feeling about my work
environment (the desktop). There is a lot of friction that comes when each of
my applications wants to be its own immersive experience. My take-away from
his post is that he seems to be iterating away from those rich, colorful, and
distracting interfaces to something that is kind of interface-less.

This, too, is my dream (or sorts).

\- Spotify without the spotify interface. (Google Music, in his case)

\- Slack without the slack interface (IRC, I guess)

\- Email without the web-client or sluggish Apple mail interface.

I know there are CLI for each of those use cases. But it takes commitment to
learn and get them working to your liking.

~~~
cmiles74
I think I'd go a little further, even: not only is there friction moving from
one "immersive" application to another, there seems to be some expenditure of
energy necessary to actually make the switch. Each fights in it's own way, not
only to deliver on it's function but to somehow tempt you into spending ever
more time with that particular application.

A console or text-based interface seems like a big equalizer; for sure it's
often easier to manage a console application but it puts hard limits on how
much attention these applications may siphon away. Perhaps it's easier for my
attention to wander than others, but when the task at hand is particularly
boring or unpleasant, I find I can waste quite a lot of time browsing through
music or "catching up" on likely useless Slack conversations. Since I've moved
them to a text-based interface, I do feel I am wasting time like this far less
often.

~~~
SanderSantema
This is exactly the reason why I've tried to port as much stuff as I can to my
terminal. Productivity in the sense of using a program faster is a nice by-
product, but preserving my attention is way more important to me. To me it
seems nowadays you don't pay hard cash for things online, you pay in
attention. I'm trying to get my digital experience to serve me again instead
of me serving to something which I'm using.

On a sidenote: Any tips on making my digital experience less attention
focused? For instance I would really like to use surf or uzbl but they don't
have support for MacOS and I would still need an adblocker/ reader mode.

------
foxhop
> There’s a way in which you could say that Emacs is a place whereas vi is a
> tool.

This really resonates with me, and I have to say I agree.

I try to treat my browser as a tool, it holds state only for as long as it's
open. I pretend that at any time the browser (or computer) could crash and I
would loose my place.

I use my web browser (I switched back to Firefox from many years with Chrome)
very similar to how I use my email inbox.

For email this is "inbox zero". If I need to reread an email, respond, or do
something with a message, I mark it as unread. Unread stuff gets cleared at
least once a day (often more now that I have a smart phone). I open my email
and work it down to zero (or as close as I can) and then I close it. Email
acts as a tool, a communication / todo list, hybrid.

An unread email is the same as an open browser tab, it symbolizes work-in-
progress.

With my web broswer, I open it as needed and open as many tabs or even windows
as I need. When a tab, window, or page is no longer needed, I close it.

To "save" a page I create a bookmark (but I can't tell you the last time I've
actually used bookmarks to find something). Another way I "save" is when I'm
tearing down my web browser, I pull a page's tab out into it's own window.
This marks it as "unread"; I need to do something with it.

This process doesn't really save the page, it just allows me to clear out the
other tabs and context out of my head. It helps me focus, and reminds me to
just do that task on the single tab instead of letting it linger.

I close my web browser multiple times a day.

I follow this practice with my terminal windows as well.

~~~
b0rsuk
To easily emulate this sort of browser behavior, just use it in Porn Mode
(Privacy Mode).

------
mbrock
The way I see it, my whole computing environment is necessarily a kind of
place. Emacs happens to be a really good one.

So, I use Emacs as a window manager. My computer boots into a full screen
Emacs, so I don't think of it as opening Emacs — I think of my computer as an
Emacs-based thing, which in turn contains a bunch of other tools (like M-x
shell for running shell commands).

The way the author uses xterm with tmux and Vim, I use Emacs instead.

My environment has a large font and no syntax highlighting. I find that
language mode regexps so often get confused that they're more annoying than
convenient.

I would really, really like to try working with an e-ink monitor. Slow latency
and monochrome would be a benefit as far as I'm concerned.

~~~
tomsmeding
> I find that language mode regexps so often get confused that they're more
> annoying than convenient.

For what language modes do you have that experience? I haven't used emacs
myself much, but in other editors, most syntax highlighting descriptions are
pretty good. The only exception to this rule is highlighting Haskell, which is
apparently a monstrous challenge that no-one can even do remotely well.

~~~
mbrock
It's really, really hard to make a completely correct mode based on
regexes—just consider the challenge of writing a regex that correctly
highlights the syntax of regex itself, which you need for JavaScript, Ruby,
and lots of other languages.

Heredocs in shell, metaprogramming tricks in Ruby, reader extensions in Lisp,
nested quotes, etc etc etc—I might be weird, but I feel like I run into these
edge cases a lot, when editors think my parens are unbalanced when they're
actually not, and so on.

Auto-indentation rarely formats things the way I want, too, and I very rarely
need anything more advanced than shifting blocks in and out.

I also just find it a bit strange that we have culturally started to believe
that editing code is nearly _unthinkable_ without different colors everywhere!

~~~
tomsmeding
I completely agree that highlighting code with regexps is almost useless, but
if emacs is not capable of doing more than that (or its language modes usually
do not do more than that), I think that emacs is at fault here, not syntax
highlighting.

In sublime text, for example, the syntax definitions are basically stack
machines (if I'm not mistaken), and can therefore parse any context-free
grammar. This is clearly powerful enough to handle all the edge cases you
mention.

~~~
mbrock
Well, that's cool.

------
ssivark
> Every change I’ve made in my working environment over the past year or so
> has also been a lessening of immersiveness. My interfaces have become less
> rich, less colorful, less dynamic.

I really like the author's place -vs- tool metaphor to contrast wannabe
immersive experiences with tools that stay out of your way. I don't think it
makes sense to avoid having places you go to (where you feel "at home") -- I
mean that very generally, but even in the specific case of computing, your
goto places might be your favorite browser, the command line, the unix system,
Emacs, your IDE etc. A place where you feel at home, at control, with a sense
of the multitude of possibilities lying ahead, and still in the driver's seat.

The important requirement then is that the environment shouldn't try to nudge
you around (especially towards misaligned goals). This is where most
web/software platforms of today come up short, IMHO.

This metaphor is also the best elucidation of Alan Kay's pithy quote
(reproduced approximately): To me, a computer is worth more than my car,
because of all the things it enables me to do. Most people, however, pay about
as much for a computer, as they pay for a TV, and use it in roughly the same
way.

~~~
qznc
I also like the distinction of “tool” and “place”. It feels like a useful
mental concept.

I can see a relation to the economics of software development. Companies want
their products to be places, so they capture a slice of your attention and
deepen awareness of their brand. Nvidia is an example: It is just a single
part of the computer hardware, yet it comes with a GUI tool and often demands
attention.

Free software can afford to become a tool. Imagine if you boot a Linux desktop
and various involved projects show you a series of splash screens first: This
desktop experience brought to you by systemd, dbus, dnsmasq, CUPS,
NetworkManager, PulseAudio, Gnome, Mozilla Firefox, Gnome Keyring Daemon,
gvfsd, and bash.

------
munificent
Does anyone else remember the WinAmp era of music software? There was a time
when basically every app for playing music on your computer lived inside a
little floating window that you carried with you to all of the other apps you
were using at the time.

That really did help me think of my music player as a tool and not a place.
Though the little scrolling text could be distracting sometimes, I do
occasionally find myself missing that style of interface.

~~~
romwell
Well, I've never had a single reason for abandoning WinAmp for playing music
that lives on my hard drive - so yes, I do remember.

WinAmp is a tool, and it still works. If you aren't using it, perhaps you
actually want a place instead of a tool?

~~~
munificent
I do still want a tool, but I no longer maintain a local corpus of music
files. I prefer streaming services these days.

~~~
romwell
Yup, but a streaming music service is a place. A tool is something that you
have.

For that matter, Winamp is still a tool you can use to access streaming
services: rtsp streams / internet radio / ShoutCast / etc.

The problem is not with the tool, it's with the places you want to bring your
tools to. They specifically don't allow you to do that. They close down the
API's and take down alternative clients.

Spotify feels like a place because it is a place, and it's not your home.

------
patrickmay
"There’s a way in which you could say that Emacs is a place whereas vi is a
tool."

As an Emacs user, I agree with this. The author's preference for more tools
and fewer immersive applications still resonates with me because I see Emacs
as a place for all the tools I need for development and writing.

~~~
nextos
That's true. Emacs is a platform, a virtual Lisp machine. The Web is another
platform. Plus our OS plumbing, usually Unix.

Understanding my computer this way has brought me a lot of sanity. I only use
a tiling window manager (xmonad), Emacs, a browser (firefox) and a Unix
terminal (urxvt).

Previously I was trying to move most of my computing into pure Unix CLI. While
it was fast and simple, I found most ncurses applications (e.g. mutt, remind,
irssi) do not really compose as well as simple Unix programs do (e.g. wc,
grep, xargs). Moving everything to elisp packages instead (e.g. org, notmuch,
magit), where all elisp nicely blends together has been a great improvement.
Plus dealing with configuration in a functional way, by switching to NixOS.

------
TeddyDD
It seems I'm heading in similar direction as author of the post. I switched
from Gnome to i3 (I don't even have display manager installed), from Nautilius
to ranger and then to
[lf]([https://github.com/gokcehan/lf](https://github.com/gokcehan/lf)). I use
a lot of CLI tools like weechat. I'v been using Emacs for few months but now I
prefer Kakoune - it's easier to customize. My
[website]([https://www.teddydd.me/](https://www.teddydd.me/)) is pure html+css
brutalism without single line of JavaScript...

I just feel tired of huge, complicated software that requires big time
investment to customize. I want things to be simple and modular. My setup is
not beautiful, might have fewer features than full DE, but it's ergonomic and
I understand what all my configs do.

------
cellover
i3wm has been a huge productivity boost for me as a development machine at
home for the following reasons:

    
    
      - no distractions
      - minimalism, most navigation on the keyboard
      - easy to setup a startup script that preloads your default screens / workspaces / apps setup
      - easy to map your workspaces in your mind
    

From machine boot to coding: 30 seconds.

[https://twitter.com/Phonosheet/status/952179820447911936](https://twitter.com/Phonosheet/status/952179820447911936)

~~~
overcast
I've been experimenting with moving my "getting work done" setup over to an
old laptop running just Mint Linux for that exact reasoning. I end up getting
so distracted on my MacPro desktop, because it's got everything on there.
Movies/Games/Messaging/Email etc. I need just a distraction free environment
that still allows me to do web development.

~~~
thurt
Instead of mint, if you are doing a new install and looking for a minimalist
approach with i3, consider wattOS distro microwatt edition.

I found it on distrowatch; I installed it about 6 months ago on an old laptop
and I'm pretty happy with it.

~~~
overcast
Thanks for the response, is that based on debian/ubuntu? I need to have that
environment to mirror production environments.

~~~
avhon1
Yes.

[http://planetwatt.com/new/index.php/about/](http://planetwatt.com/new/index.php/about/)

"wattOS is a lightweight Linux operating system remastered from the core
Ubuntu Linux build."

~~~
cellover
I did not know the existence of this distribution, thanks i'll look into it.

------
Pete_D
Emacs doesn't feel like either a tool or a place to me. If you use emacsdaemon
and emacsclient, it becomes not a fixed place you work in, or a completely
static tool, but something like a part of the ether you can draw from when
needed. There's background state, but much less of the spatial/navigational
burdens the author talks about. It's interesting they go on to mention mpd.

I'm not just saying this just to nitpick - I think the stateful daemon concept
is a useful extension to the place/tool metaphor and might be a way to achieve
the author's desired web browsing experience.

For example, what if web browsers could move tabs to a sort of "invisible
window", and there was some shell command like "recall-tab Hacker News" which
foregrounded them into a new window? I think something like this might be
already possible with something like surf or uzbl and window manager
cooperation.

~~~
chriswarbo
Most tabbed browsers allow opening pages in a new tab. At a previous job I
used [https://github.com/mbhutton/chrome-duplicate-tab-
detector](https://github.com/mbhutton/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector) (
[http://chriswarbo.net/git/chrome-duplicate-tab-
detector](http://chriswarbo.net/git/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector) ) for
chrome, which was useful for switching to URLs from other programs (e.g. if a
Web site's integration test failed, the error message would include a URL to
see what (unexpected) output was found)

------
b0rsuk
I like various discussion forums and talking to people online (often on IRC -
when I'm programming). I like exchange of ideas, even arguing - as long as it
remains respectful.

I consider message boards / forums bloated and clunky. I miss usenet and
threaded discussion. Disqus technically does that, but it takes what, 20
seconds to load ? And after recent acquisition it's only going to get worse.

I think threaded discussion is much more like natural human conversation than
"topics" on message boards. That's shoe-horning discussion. They invariably
get off topic sooner or later, and moderators pride themselves on deleting
posts that stray too far.

It boggles my mind why topic-based message boards remain popular.

~~~
KajMagnus
Maybe Talkyard is a bit different? It's new forum software, threaded, inspired
by Hacker News: [https://www.talkyard.io](https://www.talkyard.io). (I'm
developing it)

With improvements over HN: [https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-
be-improved-...](https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-
improved-3-things)

Hmm I think threaded discussions, make the more sense, the more people join
the discussion. If 999 people talk about something, they're going to split up
into smaller groups, each group talking about a sub topic = thread. And
everything laid out in a flat way = a huge mess. But if just 5 people talk
about something — then they can stay focused on the same thing all of them.
Flat = more ok.

~~~
b0rsuk
Indentation depth is an issue for me, too. I would solve this differently:
color coded post backgrounds (or similar indicators).

Parent post = red indentation 1 = orange yellow, blue, green, brown, grey,
black, white, etc. Then colors could cycle.

I think it would make it easy at a glance to recognize which posts respond to
what, after some initial getting used to. No clicking required and I think
it's more intuitive.

For colorblind users you could use SVG pattern backgrounds. In fact, it could
be better for everyone, because you could have more patterns than visually
distinct colors.

~~~
KajMagnus
This is an interesting idea I think. Actually, on narrow screens, I don't use
more than one or two indentation levels. Thereafter everything is flat — and
instead of arrows, there're clickable "In reply to @username" text one can
click and jump to the parent comment. Here, the color coding you describe,
could maybe be helpful.

When there _is_ enough space for indendation, though, I'd prefer indenting.
Otherwise, cannot visualize more than the first indentation depth, right.

(Hmm not sure what you have in mind with _" no clicking required"_ — Hacker
News and Talkyard also don't require any clicking?)

~~~
b0rsuk
I don't mean colors _instead_ of indentation, I mean in addition to.
Indentation works well when there are very few replies and few indentation
levels. But once there's a long debate, it becomes a well. Then when the well
ends it's very hard to immediately tell what it's responding to.

No clicking required - I mean clicking to jump to parent. That's introducing
GOTOs to online discussion. If possible, I'd rather have a more intuitive way.
Or maybe even something as blunt as printing the indentation level directly as
a number!

~~~
KajMagnus
Aha, now I think I better understand what you mean. When coloring posts in the
way you have in mind, then, to find the parent comment, one would look at the
comments above, for a comment in a certain _color_? Then one won't need to
rely so much on the indentation depth.

Hmm that's an interesting idea. I'm a bit worried the resulting page would
make use of too many colors — maybe a grayscale and patterns would be better
(like you mentioned).

One would, however, still need to click-and-jump, or scroll-manually, to find
the parent, if one needs to reread it, and it's not on screen. I think the
colors would mainly be useful on large screens, where one sees the parent
comment without scrolling. On mobiles, I think click-to-jump-to-the-parent is
more user friendly (rather than scrolling-scrolling-scrolling and scanning for
a certain color).

------
na85
Interesting read, but ultimately I was left confused as to the purpose of the
article. As far as I can tell it was to express the author's disdain for the
modern web stack (an embarrassment for web devs, to be sure) and to advocate
using vim (yawn).

~~~
heavenlyblue
I think I mainly understand the point author tries to make: for example, it
takes time to learn all of the shirtcuts in any GUI application (let's say,
Slack) and become a power-user in it; so why not have a proper console
interface if it's the same case for pushing buttons?

Nevertheless Slack still manages to do it badly: Cmd+Shift+K takes 3 seconds
to load the list of channels for a quick jump. How's that considered usable?

It's something I generally miss: the ability to do actions using the keyboard.
I think IDEA did it relatively well: their double-shift "Search everywhere"
window works both fast and literally searches everything, providing something
quite familiar to the console.

~~~
suprfnk
> it takes time to learn all of the shirtcuts in any GUI application

I'd say in most cases it takes more time to learn a console application. GUI's
these days are, mostly, pretty intuitive. CLI applications are not intuitive
at all.

The difference is, for me, that GUI use quickly levels out in efficiency. _If_
I have learned the CLI commands and know them well, I generally can do tasks a
whole lot quicker than a GUI I know well. It just has a higher up-front cost,
which may be very worth it, to not worth it at all, depending on how much you
use the application.

~~~
mbrock
CLI programs that have decent --help feel very intuitive to me, especially if
they're designed by someone with experience using command line tools.

GUI programs can be intuitive too, but they also have their own special anti-
intuitive things: meaningless icons, weird drag and drop paradigms, etc.

------
bitwize
Emacs is sort of a weird beast -- simultaneously tool and workbench. It can be
infinitely shaped to fit the task at hand -- while it is in use -- but it
integrates relatively smoothly with all the other tools available in a modern
Unix environment, allowing those tools to extend the reach of Emacs without
becoming part of it.

But really, I -- and everybody else -- should really just use an IDE. For OO
languages you _need_ to have intelligent refactoring (and IntelliSense) and so
you _need_ to have an IDE. Refactoring tools are to programming what
nondestructive editing is to image editing: a total paradigm shift in workflow
that no one these days can live without. It takes a lot of effort to extend
Emacs to understand the target language well enough to support these features
(and it won't be done in elisp).

------
microcolonel
I've been running basically the same stuff for the last six years. I have a
somewhat modified fork of dwm, a lightly modified version of Termite (simplest
working VTE3 terminal I could find), and my emacs (which has had basically the
same configuration for the last four years). Most things take up the whole
screen or the left or right division of it. I run the same thing on my high
memory Xeon workstation that I do on my repurposed Chromebook and my OpenBSD
ThinkPad.

I can't really do anything about employer mandated Slack, but most corporate
or hosted email is accessible through IMAPS and SMTP. Can't do much about
Spotify, but I don't use that while working anyway, I tend to buy music files
if it's convenient to do so, and I play those in cmus.

~~~
Ascetik
Clementine is the simplist Spotify replacement application I could find to
avoid using their clunky app.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
I wish one of the streaming services would just embrace the mpd model and ship
as a music daemon that speaks a well-defined protocol + a reference client.
They could brand this as something like “music for IoT”

------
b0rsuk
I think avoiding mouse interfaces is a valid goal. Mouse is necessary only for
a few things:

\- graphical programs (but Blender makes a heavy use of hotkeys) \- some games
\- new interfaces. Mouse is easier to use initially. Websites fall into this
category, I'd say they're even a pathological case: it's pretty common for a
website to radically change its interface. It can be partially dealt with, for
example Konqueror used to display link hotkeys when you press CTRL. I need to
look it up.

Most of the time you don't require extra precision a mouse offers. A button
press is binary, so why require precise movements, mess with icon sizes, etc ?

------
nwah1
There's a lot of arguments that various people make regarding the supposed
superiority of different setups.

1) It is claimed that using keyboard-only controls reduces "context
switching."

2) It is claimed that tiling window managers are simpler and more logical,
because you use more of the screen real estate and keep everything open all
the time.

3) It is claimed that vim and emacs are better because the brief keyboard
commands allow for amazing power with few keystrokes.

Alas, these are almost all arguments voiced by people who grew up with
technologies built around severely limited hardware constraints. GUIs were
terrible for the longest time, and ten or twenty years ago you certainly
couldn't get acceptable performance on them when working remotely.

There are very good reasons why people would avoid all of these tools.
Hardware is much better. Compositing window managers are much better.

It is particularly understandable that people avoid vim and emacs. And there's
really no empirical evidence at all that they save time, improve accuracy, or
anything else.

And any empirical studies on this question would have difficulty isolating the
variables. People who do understand systems at the low level, and with all the
historical context, could very well be better programmers in some ways... but
not because of their environment.

Thinking you could become like Richard Stallman by using emacs is cargo cult
reasoning.

------
kenbolton
I've been fantasizing recently about using a Bluetooth keyboard (Twiddler3)
connected to an eInk reader to do most of my work both locally and on remote
machines/instances. The eInk reader would have just enough power to run
spacemacs. I can currently do this on an Android smartphone, but the
experience is lacking because of the screen-size.

~~~
sleepybrett
I already have enough frustration using an eink screen for reading books
around the refresh rate of updating that page that I couldn't even imagine the
pain of trying to use one interactively.

~~~
jacquesm
Imagine then what life was like when an editor meant a line editor and output
universally referred to stacks of fan-fold green and white lined paper.

The 'refresh rate' of a line editor would be a couple of seconds at best and
to do an edit-compile-test cycle would be on the order of a couple of hours,
two per day if you are lucky, but most likely only one per day.

------
alfonsodev
related, "Optimal colors to improve readability for people with dyslexia" [1]

[1] [https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-
customization/r11](https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/r11)

------
totalperspectiv
Is there an Acme / Plan 9 theme for Sublime? Initial Googlings don't show
anything.

------
bprasanna
Can someone please identify the font used in code snippet (image)?

~~~
rwnspace
[https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/](https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/)

To do this: ctrl+U (in FF) -> look for css link at top of html -> look for
font names near top of css.

~~~
bprasanna
Thanks a ton!

------
zitterbewegung
I do this with emacs .

------
YuukiRey
Funny because I just went the other way. I was running Arch/i3 on a Lenovo
W530 I had for work. At some point I couldn't take it anymore. I wanted to use
my headsets over bluetooth. I wanted to have no issues with monitor DPI and
scaling and the dreaded optimus Nvidia technology. I don't want to have to
think about which port I use to connect to an external monitor. I want Wifi to
be a solved problem. Boot the laptop, choose the network, enter password,
done. I want good battery life and the most basic compositing features
enabled.

In hindsight it's crazy that I'd fiddle with WM_STATE_SOMETHING in compton so
that X has shadow but Y doesn't if they overlap with transparency (or
something like that). My dunst notifications looked very aesthetically
pleasing but... so do countless default notifications on mainstream distros.

Yes, the whole mopidy/mcp/whatever looks really rad, especially if a program
uses vi(m) keyboard shortcuts, but my music player really isn't something I
want to think about and learn. Playing music isn't such an integral part of my
work day that I need to make it more efficient.

I am now using a MacBook Pro at work and on my desktop at home I use Antergos
with Gnome. The latter is perfect as it gives me up-to-date packages and easy
access to the AUR, while still coming with the bells and whistles of Gnome.

I am also not sure if tiling windows really improve your productivity. I would
say that most people would be better of having their apps on full-screen, to
minimize distractions, instead of having all sorts of windows side-by-side.

Ultimately I nowadays resonate more with what some other posts have mentioned:
pick a platform and programs with sane defaults and only deviate from them if
it's really worth it. If your job requires you to look at several terminals at
the same time constantly and things like terminator/tmux/gnome-terminal don't
do it, then sure, look into i3 (herbstluftwm/[insert flavor of the month]).
Anything else I would now consider premature optimization.

