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Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

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Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#71

Post by cesnja »

lprd wrote: post #53
cellover wrote: post #15

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

Is there an equivilent to i3 in the mac ecosystem? I currently use iTerm with tmux... so would using a window manager, on top of all that, be overkill?

I used Amethyst and KWM in the past, but ultimately settled on Spectacleapp, which is great for basic window management. Sadly, neither of them can really compare with i3wm when you take into account the tabbed mode and easy window splitting.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#72

Post by 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.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#73

Post by avhon1 »

overcast wrote: post #47
thurt wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Yes.

http://planetwatt.com/new/index.php/about/

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

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#74

Post by lostconfused »

munificent wrote: post #39

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 my…

Pretty sure Foobar2000 is still the most common go to audio playback software for audiophiles and enthusiasts.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#75

Post by sk8ingdom »

sheraz wrote: post #5

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 withou…

This is generally my goal with Emacs customization. I'm basically just using APIs (Spotify, Outlook Exchange Server, myFittnessPal, Reddit, HN) in a common Emacs interface. The downside, of course, is that it's a lot of work to develop and maintain.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#76

Post by chriswarbo »

Pete_D wrote: post #72

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 nitpic…

Most tabbed browsers allow opening pages in a new tab. At a previous job I used https://github.com/mbhutton/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)

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#77

Post by cygned »

auto wrote: post #56
freehunter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

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.

:set rnu nu

All I need to get started.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#78

Post by blunte »

munificent wrote: post #39

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 my…

This is perhaps the opposite of minimalism, but I miss the days of Winamp and really awesome visualizations. When Winamp fell away, iTunes and the rest just never bothered to make many entertaining visualizations. It's too bad - some of the wa visualizers were so entrancing that it really did enhance the "listening" experience.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#79

Post by sweeneyrod »

walshemj wrote: post #45
walshemj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is it CLI or GUI is better for you its not clear and for an experienced developer often CLI is better than GUI a shell to MySQL is better that the abomination that is PHPMYSQL.

Really saying that a CLI to a RDBMS is better than a GUI (PHPMYADMIN) there must be more script kiddies on hn than I thought

No, just a lot of people who like punctuation.

Re: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker

#80

Post by mxstbr »

sk1pper wrote: post #32

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…

This is pretty much my exact setup, and I've been loving it. (the new Firefox is 99% super awesome)

The only thing I still have some configuration for is vim[0]. Mostly to make it work better with tmux and for an improved JavaScript development workflow.

[0]: my .vimrc: https://github.com/mxstbr/dotfiles/blob/master/vimrc

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