Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
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Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
1–10 of 107 posts
Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
#2Interesting 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).
Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
#3Interesting 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).
While I'd heard about Plan 9 and acme from following Rob Pike's work, I didn't know about acme-colors and that it takes a different approach than the typical syntax-highlighting theme. I found it interesting enough to experiment with.
Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
#4Interesting 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).
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.
Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
#5I 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.
Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
#6Interesting 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).
I understood the purpose to be identifying "immersive" (emacs-like) programs that sick you in and trigger a mental context-switch, versus vim-like transient tools that you pick up and put down as you need them, all without leaving the mental "place" you're in. He then argues that this effect is significant and wonders how we can get less immersive software.
Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
#7I do this with emacs .
Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
#8I'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.
Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
#9The 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.
Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
#10Interesting 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).
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 considere…
> 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.