Part 1: Context and Goals
Every few years I end up feeling motivated to change the tools, or how I use the tools, to do my hobby programming and writing (and professional work). This time has come again. Oh no.
The conceit is, of course, that new usages and tools will be “better”, and I will consequently be more effective at what I want to do. In truth it’s hard to really see that happening on net. So this is basically for fun, but I can hope it will lead me to a durably-better place.
Anyways, this time I’ve decided to really lean into the idea of improving my inner-work-loop: really be conscious of what I’m doing when developing or writing, and so see opportunities where I’m doing something silly. Things like ensuring I’m doing incremental builds, handy Vim motions, running very targeted tests, and so on, are easy to put off, and I think I’ve put them off too much. I say this partly as a reaction to the other direction, where people spend their whole lives optimizing their Vim macros (or whatever) to the detriment of the work-actual these tools are purported to help!
So I’ve decided to take the time to do a wholesale revisiting on my off hours. (This has the added advantage of being mentally simple: I’ve not had the mental energy to really dive into caching algorithms the way I had hoped, as I’m currently stretched thin in a few ways.) The tools I’ve assessed and decided to lean into are:
The actual OS will be WSL on Windows, and I’ll be using the Windows terminal as the entry point into Tmux.
Next Steps
I’ve actually already done quite a bit in learning and getting used to the above tools already. I anticipate a sequence of blog posts following this in which I either opine on tools in general, or include notes on what I’m doing in particular. Writing this out might help me durably remember some useful tricks, and at least force to me articulate what I’m trying to get out of this latest round of revisiting. For any other readers, hopefully this will be interesting or useful.