
Joey Hess' minimal approach - mastar2323
http://joey.hess.usesthis.com/
======
jakobe
It's great to be reminded that productivity doesn't really depend as much on
the tools you use as some might have you believe.

I keep thinking about buying a faster laptop, or I'm complaining that getting
fiber is way to expensive where I live, and then I read about someone on an
ancient tiny netbook on dialup who is probably way more productive than I am.

~~~
w1ntermute
> I read about someone on an ancient tiny netbook on dialup who is probably
> way more productive than I am.

And you're not him. It doesn't matter how productive _he_ is on "an ancient
tiny netbook on dialup", it matters how productive _you_ would be on it.

Getting a faster laptop or fiber is a simple matter of weighing the costs
against the benefits _for you_. If it increases _your_ productivity enough to
outweigh the costs, then you should get it.

~~~
jarek
I read that as more of a reflection on the necessity of things. It's possible
fiber would be an improvement for jakobe, of course, but perhaps only a local
maximum. "This guy does without it - maybe the lack of fiber isn't the biggest
thing holding me back."

------
RyanMcGreal
"If it doesn't have a keyboard, I feel that my thoughts are being forced out
through a straw."

Beautiful.

~~~
kami8845
Yeah. Says the guy doing all his work on a 1024 x 600 display. I mean the guy
no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly back-worldly.
Like using dial-up and limiting yourself to fan-less laptops. I mean I get the
"thin terminal" philosophy where you have a shit laptop that connects to
something much more potent. But where's the point if the connection sucks as
well.

I guess in the end we have vastly different use cases, which is perfectly
fine. I found it a quite interesting, if a little obscure, article to read.

~~~
npsimons
I hate to pull this card on you, but what have you done? We're talking about a
Debian developer who has also developed (and continues to develop) basically
an open-source replacement for Dropbox
([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-
assistan...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-
like-dropbox-but-with-your-own)), by himself on an incredible budget. He
actually Gets Shit Done, and does it relatively efficiently. I would not be
surprised at all if a factor towards being productive is the fact that his
daily Internet connection doesn't support browsing Facebook. And when you are
a creator rather than a consumer (especially of the written word, be it code,
essays or books), screen size rarely matters.

~~~
pwang
> And when you are a creator rather than a consumer (especially of the written
> word, be it code, essays or books), screen size rarely matters.

I don't necessarily agree with the parent post's sentiments, but I also
disagree with this very broad blanket statement of yours. I am reasonably
happy most of the time on my Macbook Air screen, but I definitely prefer to be
coding on a larger screen when I can. I knew Joey back in college and he is a
sharp guy with a LOT of working memory. My memory has gotten worse over time,
and I tend to work with heterogenous codebases, so I can't fit everything in
my head and need the screen real estate.

I know many excellent, productive devs who love having large screens to code
on.

~~~
joeyh
You sure you knew the same guy? My working memory is crap, and, presumably,
getting worse. ;)

I find that functional programming really cuts down on the amount of mental
state I need to maintain. So while I'll have some API docs and another module
or two open for reference, I don't need to worry about what that variable gets
set to two pages above.

Maybe avoiding that kind of unnecessary detail makes one's unconscious better
able to work on the program too. Still learning about this:
<http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_not_coding_late/>

~~~
pwang
Yes Joey, though I'm not sure if you still remember me - We co-founded CSLUG
back in 1995. :-) I was a lowly freshman happy to get to geek out on Linux
with CS folks. (Not many Physics people were really into it then.)

~~~
joeyh
Ah, see, I can remeber your full name, Peter .. just had trouble getting there
from the HN username. :)

As I recall, you were the secretary of CSLUG.. Indeed, querying my external
memory for your posts, I find meeting minutes you posted that bring back
memories. Nice :)

Nice to hear from you!

------
jrajav
More on Hess' minimal lifestyle:
<http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/>

I could have sworn this was a submission at some point, but I can't find it.

~~~
thejosh
It might of been linked in the comments when his kickstarter was linked?
That's when I remember reading it last.

------
ktf
> When power is low, I often hack in the evenings by lantern light.

The combination of forward-thinking hi-tech and rustic low-tech makes this
feel like something out of science fiction. I picture him as a character in a
Stephenson novel: a hermit hacker, off the grid, queuing up data and pulsing
it out only when the cells are charged and the skies are clear.

Pretty awesome :)

------
_feda_
Regarding all the comments here about dial-up and slow connections whether out
of preference or necessity, I can't recommend enough having a slow connection
and a data limit for helping you concentrate on the things that are most
important to you, but take the most effort to think about or to do. I use a
three mobile 3g dongle (UK) and pay £10 a month for 1GB of downloads. I use
wget to crawl and download web pages to view offline. I've been doing this for
over a year now and it's great for avoiding the huge potential distractions of
broadband, torrents for example, being amongst the worst offenders (have you
ever downloaded a 100 computer science textbooks and never got round to any of
them because you were watching a whole season of star trek: next generation?
It's kind of ridiculous.)

------
mazsa
Mmmm.... "What would be your dream setup? I dream of a ARM-based netbook with
exceptionally good battery life, an E-ink display, and fully open and non-
proprietary hardware. I've put off upgrading for years since this seems such
an obvious thing for the market to produce, but the market is fascinated with
locked-down tablets instead."

~~~
pplante
While that device does sound nice to have around, I disagree with the notion
that it seems such an obvious thing for the market to produce. It would have
very little market appeal outside of the development community in my opinion.

------
fmstephe
I love this setup. After the new ARM chromebook came out I got all excited and
looked about for a way to dual boot a full OS on my old series 5. It turns out
it's easy now ([http://chromeos-
cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-n...](http://chromeos-
cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-now-with-double-bits.html)) There
is a lot of pleasure in using such a small machine.

I am definitely looking forward to an e-ink laptop. As I get older my eyes
grow more weary, but the e-ink display on my kindle is a joy to look at.

~~~
gvalkov
My main gripe with chromebooks is that they don't have a _windows key_
(KEY_LEFTMETA). As a xmonad user, I have quite a lot of functionality bound to
that key and I'm not too sure about moving it over to KEY_LEFTALT (mostly
because of conflicts with my Emacs key bindings).

~~~
fmstephe
Have you tried overloading the search key (used to be caps lock). This key is
roughly useless outside chromeos (and I never used it inside chromeos anyway).
I am planning to bind that key to my windows-key when I get home tonight so I
can use the keyboard to get at my Unity launcher.

As an aside, I was very impressed how well Unity runs on relatively anaemic
hardware. for running a terminal and a web browser it runs great.

~~~
gvalkov
That's a reasonable alternative and something that one could get used to.
After all, Vim and Emacs people have been rebinding _Caps Lock_ to _Esc_ /
_Ctrl_ for a long time. One possible downside is the extra strain that this
would put on the pinky.

An alternative that I've been wondering about is key sequences (M x) for WM
actions and key chords (M-x) for all other things. This seems possible to do
in xmonad (last point in this blog post [1])

[1] <http://versia.com/2009/10/xmonad-metacity-gnome/>

------
dailo10
"I don't use a desk. I work in five or six different places and postures
around the house. When the weather's good, I'm outside, or on the porch. My
preferred "desktop background" is some interesting view in back of my
netbook's rather small screen."

This is such a liberating setup. I'm rethinking my need for a home office now.

~~~
w1ntermute
> This is such a liberating setup.

Yeah, it's "liberating" until you develop chronic back and shoulder pain later
in life.

~~~
nevinera
Observing your body and changing positions whenever they become uncomfortable
is _far_ better for your long-term health than is a well-engineered chair.

I now rotate between a standing desk, a normal desk, a couch (only when
reading/exploring - typing here is tougher), and the floor, and all of my back
problems have disappeared.

~~~
reeses
Pilates is great for developing that sense of individual muscle fatigue and
for strengthening the muscles that will hold you in proper form.

------
pdog
_> Lately I've been focusing on programs that encourage broader use of version
control systems, like git. The goal is to harness all the power that's been
developed by developers for developers for managing source code, and redirect
it to other purposes._

This is very interesting, especially his Kickstarter project[1]. I've always
wondered how distributed revision control systems could be used in other
domains.

[1] - [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-
assistan...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-
like-dropbox-but-with-your-own/)

------
zalew
> I use the XFCE desktop environment, with the Xmonad window manager.

I was just going to try that in my xfce, what a coincidence. In case anyone is
interested, here's the instruction
[http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XF...](http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE#Configuring_XMonad_to_work_with_Xfce)

~~~
gasull
You can accomplish tiling installing x-tile in Xfce.

~~~
zalew
didn't know about that, looks like a much simpler solution. do you use it?
will try out, thanks.

------
agumonkey
Let's make a petition for someone to produce this e-ink open arm laptop. I'd
buy one immediately.

~~~
cweiss
My understanding is that the big issue is that e-Ink displays have a miserably
slow pixel update time. The new Kindle Paperwhite is on the order of 450ms
whereas the average LCD display is in the single digit ms range. Great for
static text, but horrid for anything real-time.

~~~
agumonkey
I should have mentioned that I'd be using text-mode mostly. With my keyboard
refresh rate (25key/sec) => 40ms max per redraw. That's .. quite far. If you
look at this old kindle refresh rate, used as a terminal screen for a
raspberry pi, it's almost usable :
<http://www.ponnuki.net/2012/09/kindleberry-pi/>

I wonder how it would be on a newer eink screen.

~~~
agumonkey
Another video: vim on eink

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdmX52SCpG0>

not glorious.

------
lucaspiller
"The only other active computer in the house is my home server and internet
gateway; a Sheevaplug with a wireless dongle and a dialup modem."

Everything else maybe... but I could never go back to dialup!

~~~
potkor
A dial-in might be useful though.

------
elliott99
I've never been to usesthis.com before. What a wonderful website! I would love
to see more interviews like this.

~~~
fafner
I like the idea of usesthis. But I'm a bit disappointed that most setups are
boring and not really individualized. This makes a lot of the interviews
uninteresting if you don't know (care for) the developer. "Spoiler:" 2/3 seem
to be using a Mac Book and a fairly common configuration. Please don't
misunderstand me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that configuration.
But it's not very interesting to read about.

I think Joey Hess is a major exception here because he has a very individual
and interesting setup. Stallman, Russ Cox and _why are a few other interesting
setups iirc.

~~~
waferbaby
Yeah, I'm always trying to get interesting people, but I never know ahead of
time what they use. Feel free to suggest more, though!

~~~
elliott99
Actually, while I still very much like the idea of the site, I think I spoke
too soon...it's very much focused on the hardware and software used, whereas I
thought it was interviews with people in general from all walks of
creative/hacker/writing/painting life about their workflow and how they get
stuff done. More of these types of interviews would interest me.

------
mhd
Interesting, but not totally unexpected as this is very much in the tradition
of Unix terminal users. Never mind that today's "dumb terminal" is probably an
order of magnitude more powerful than yesterdays mainframes, and you can fall
back to even bigger servers without many problems.

But I'm always a bit surprised by small-screen laptop-only users, whether it's
this rather charming off-the-grid kind or your average Macbook Air coffee shop
inhabitant. I like my mechanical keyboards, large displays (area, not dpi) and
desk-bound isolation. Never mind that laptops introduce quite a few technical
problems (heat, upgrades, computing power) that are easily avoided by your
cheap mini tower.

And I guess that's at least one minor way in which I've succeeded over
distraction without even trying: I don't have a big need to mix my
programming/writing/browsing with outdoorsy and/or (real-life) social
elements. I wonder whether the rather common preference of landscape
background pictures (e.g. Napa valley) is part of that desire.

~~~
brandall10
5 months ago I transitioned from being a desktop C# app developer for medical
devices to a Rails remote contractor.

This meant going from a dual quad core 3.33 extreme desktop machine with 3
displays (2 x 24 and 1 21) to an 11" Macbook Air with a 1.7 dual i5.

I'm much faster on the air. I have a tiling setup that I can quickly
switch/move windows around, it keeps my vision and neck focused and reduces
strain to both. It allows me to better mentally focus on what I'm currently
working on, instead of having my IDE, source control, collab tool, bug
tracker, etc, always visible at the same time. I'd rather do a couple quick
chord commands than snap my neck 30 degrees one way for 15 seconds seconds
then snap it back in the other direction.

As to heat/power? Spectacular with my MBA, this thing is as fast as last
year's Macbook Pro and the iMac the year before. I've been writing software
professionally since '96 and at least in the windows world, the tools have not
changed a whole lot in that time period. The only advantage of a faster
machine is faster compiles and db rebuilds/queries. And I'm not doing that
enterprise level work of 300k+ code bases and 5 gig databases anywhere. But I
did 15 years ago, and yeah, now something that would used to take over an hour
might take 2 minutes. On my MBA is might take 5 minutes. For something I'd do
a handful of times a day, not a big deal, but again, I don't do those types of
things anymore.

Don't get me wrong. I'd appreciate more resolution. But probably more inclined
to use that for extra clarity rather than increase my desktop space by a
significant degree. There's a sweet spot where bad habits begin to creep back
in, where just too much info is presented at one time that cognitive overload
begins to set in. Just my personal experience, but I've had both setups and
the latter works much better for me.

~~~
fmstephe
I have had a similar experience. I am a professional Java developer, which
means 1G Eclipse + 1mm LOC projects. And started hacking on Go in my spare
time. The difference is phenomenal. I can use a full screen terminal with vim
+ another screen with a browser. This is paradise.

All my tools respond instantly (with a big enough project eclipse stutters on
every interaction, even with an i7 + 16G of ram). And I can code happily on my
monster quad core or my hacked up chromebook. This is flexibility.

Like brandall10 I found that the difference in focus is enormous. I haven't
connected with my code like this for years. In a modern IDE everything moves,
every twitch of the mouse brings up some overstuffed menu or brings up some
javadoc summary of somesuch. It is an environment of constant distraction.

My terminal is like a warm summer's morning. Clear skies and not a soul to
disturb you.

~~~
cageface
I lived in Emacs + Ruby/Python/Perl for most of 1998-2008 and I've recently
been forced into IDEs to do mobile development in Obj-C and Java.

And I'm loving it. I never had this much visibility into my code or anything
close to the refactoring power (especially in Java). Maybe things go south
with 1mm LOC projects but those are no picnic in Emacs either. I've gotten so
addicted to the benefits of a good IDE that I think I'll take a serious look
at Rubymine if I ever go back to doing Rails again.

------
mtgx
It sounds like the new Chromebook is a pretty good solution for him. Or maybe
wait a year more for the next-gen one, which hopefully will have a 4 cell
battery.

~~~
th0ma5
I've been looking for a replacement for my Mini 9 and this seems to be about
the only thing out there. Microsoft sure has strong armed everyone to make
things with regular HDDs because they needed to run Windows... I actually went
into Microcenter last year looking for a SSD netbook, and they practically
chased me out of the store, and added $50 to everything that wasn't Windows
(which they didn't have the prices on anyway). Does anyone know of a company
that has Netbooks without Windows on them at a $250 price point? Dell's Linux
pages are non-existent. I can't believe that something I bought in 2008 is now
double the price.

~~~
fmstephe
I have been searching for this laptop too. The only solution I found was to
dual boot my chromebook. Works beautifully and the hardware is cheap for what
it brings to the table.

------
draegtun
For reference - <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=joeyh>

------
dshep
I know for myself at least, upgrading to newer hardware is mostly a big
distraction from work or whatever it is I probably should be spending time on.
That said, I had a mini9 for a few weeks and typing on that tiny keyboard was
pretty painful, so props to Joey for sticking with it.

If Joey is reading this... It sounds like you are living in a remote place.
It'd be cool to see a more detailed blog post with pictures. Also as someone
who has lived with a flaky dialup connection for a long time recently, I can
highly recommend mosh. Setup irssi+bitlbee on a server running under tmux.
Then connect with mosh and attach to tmux. This way you get reliable chat and
irssi should set the important flag for the window, giving you notifications
of new messages too. You can also configure irssi to mark you as away when you
disconnect.

------
bravura
I love his minimalism. He loves hacking but he hates devices. He lives in the
most _natural_ milieu he can construct.

"I mean the guy no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly
back-worldly."

No. He approach is incredible modern.

There's some Jobs-ian about it. Steve Jobs ultimately hated devices, because a
device embodies the barrier between you and the effect you need. That is why
Jobs strove to make devices as _small_ , _unobtrusive_ , and _natural_ as
possible.

(I just started purchasing Apple, and have thus only recently began mulling
about Steve Jobs's vision.)

------
kayoone
big respect to this guy and he seems to make awesome software. But using a 5
year old netbook with very low resolution and 2gigs of ram, no external Screen
and dialup modems for internet doesnt seem like a very productive working
enviroment...but if it works for him, why not, but this is clearly is too
minimal for my taste ;)

~~~
hippich
It is just random thoughts, but may be this very limited setup helps to think
through software he develop more which probably results in better software
overall.

~~~
antidoh
I probably enjoy using whatever he writes, because it doesn't assume the
latest hot.

------
thomasfl
"I dream of a ARM-based netbook with exceptionally good battery life, an E-ink
display"

------
gadders
Did I miss this in the article, but whereabouts does Joey actually live?

~~~
secure
whois branchable.com says:

    
    
      zipcode: 37620
      city: Bristol
      state: Tennessee
      country: United States of America

------
adv0r
"I've used nothing else since 1996."

Wow, that's impressive but I'm not sure I'd be proud of not "using" any other
Operating System than my favourite for 16 years.

~~~
to3m
It's a handy way of ensuring that your time spent dicking about is minimized.
I used nothing but Windows from 1999 until mid-2010 (and I used MS-DOS as well
between 1993 and 1999). Windows 3.x was horrid, Windows '9x was horrid, and
Windows 2000 and following have their disadvantages, but there's a lot to be
said for never having to relearn any of the basics. I used only Windows XP
from 2002 (or 2003?) until 2010, which made things even more convenient.

Some people seem to like shaking things up every few years, but I'm not one of
them - it just takes time away from doing what I consider more interesting
stuff.

~~~
mahyarm
I stopped using linux and started using osx because linux always involved way
too much dicking around by it's nature.

~~~
hollerith
Same here. A person who knows how to program and who are easily annoyed by
things like inconsistent computer behavior or lack of design aesthetics should
probably avoid Linux if their interest in an OS is to help them be productive.

~~~
icebraining
I find Linux to be extremely consistent; almost all programs I use read data
from stdin, process it according to some arguments and output the result to
stdout ;)

~~~
hollerith
In all seriousness, the non-GUI parts of Linux are more consistent than the
GUI parts IMHO.

