#Tools

With Jekyll getting long in the tooth, and wanting to force myself to learn a new programming language, I looked at switching this blog over to Hugo or Gatsby. Gatsby won, but here’s what I learned.

While I still kinda lurv Jekyll, I’d been wanting to force myself to use languages I’m not particularly a huge fan of, Golang and javascript/typescript. A consistent (and accurate) joke amongst my staff is that I only really enjoy programming in languages that look like Ruby (Elixir and Crystal being the usual suspects here.).

The command line still provides vastly more power and flexibility than GUIs for numerous tasks. Comfort on the command line is often one of the things that distinguishes great engineers and data scientists I know.

I’m often shocked when I look at other peoples’ desktops and see a bazillion icons in their docks and taskbars. A GUI app for every conceivable eventuality. Many of them, just shiny wrappers around very simple programs. This contrasts rather sharply with my own minmalist philosophy which has been as simple as three program icons in the Dock: Finder, iTerm, and Firefox (and in Solus, just Firefox since Guake is tucked out of the way, see below.).

Every year I like doing a refresh on my Desktop tools posts 2018 here and 2017 here . I’m constantly tweaking and clarifying my toolchain to try and eek a bit more productivity out of my tools.

I’m still on my trusty, early-2016 Macbook which is now going on three years old, but I’m mow at the point I could probably move over to Linux with little disruption. Also, investigating ways to do things cross-platform has really added better arrows to the quiver. Strangely, now the issue in moving to Linux is finding a laptop as good, light, and powerful as the Macbook I currently have (and additionally, is fanless and silent.).

The Emacs org-mode system from last post is supported by a fairly simple, robust email flow designed to GTD and keep me at Inbox Zero and not overwhelmed with mail or have things fall through the cracks. This is how it runs.

For about ten years now, I’ve been using this system which I’ve modified slightly to work with what has become the default mail client for most companies, Gmail, and recently to my experiments with moving to org-mode as an organzier. It is pretty extensible to any offline client you’ll use (or Taskpaper as an organizer) as long as it integrates with Gmail. It’s a combination of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system and a riff on Gina Trapani’s Trusted Trio approach.

Productivity gains compound. So, every year I experiment tweaking my GTD system to get better at goals, planning, and, well… Getting Things Done. This is how things have gone otg-more so far compared with the Taskpaper system I’ve been using for most of the previous five years.

TLDR

Emacs (and by extension, org-mode) has a different philosophy than other tools. The idea is to do everything in emacs, which is a bit out of line with the unix philosophy I’m used to of one tool doing things well (eg. vim) and being able to string them together. It has taken a while to get used to, but after years of vim, I have to admit, I am kinda sold on the idea of an interpreter in your text editor (sorry, vim) though I am not completely sold on emacs itself (though worried I may not be able to move back from org-mode, org-habit, and org-journal anytime soon.). As an experiment, it’s been positive. Is it life-changing? Possibly. Am I sticking with emacs and org-mode? Let’s see.

It’s time for the 2018 refresh of the Desktop tools I use . I’m amazed what changes year-to-year as I try to simplify and clarify my toolchain and productivity.

Some of the evolutionary changes were interesting as I started experimenting with moving off the Apple ecosystem and moving back to Linux and an environment I move directly control and can future-proof. In particular, it’s brought up interesting compromises (and opportunities) I’d have to consider before making the leap.

I love reading Uses This where people share their tools and workflows. I’ve sniped some great tools from their posts. And back in 2004 when I started the blog, one of my most popular posts was about the tools I’d moved over to as an Apple switcher and early adopter. Time for a 2017 refresh post.

The first thing that amazes me is how much the character of my desktop and tools have changed over a decade. I’ve also changed my tastes considerably to tool selection and usage. I’ve shifted over time to moving to simpler, well-designed tools, with a much greater emphasis on text formats and simpler syncing and future-proofing, as well as adding much fewer things judiciously rather than trying to jumping to the next shiny thing unless it has a clear and compelling value over my current stack in productivity or problems it can solve.

I just recently moved the blog over to jekyll as the Jekyll team got into releasing beta versions of its 3.0 release.

Despite it’s popularity in the Rails community for a while now (enough so it raised eyebrows at me having a roll-my-own blog system), up until 3.0 I had issues with Jekyll , but the new version seems to eliminate most of my larger bugbears.

Strangely, the big catalyst behind the move was themes (and an interesting point of how policy can drive behaviour), as Google announcing it was going to start punishing sites that were not mobile responsive in its search results had organic traffic (and my search rankings) drop by half the week google pulled the trigger on it. Redesigning my theme from scratch to be mobile responsive seemed a lot more work than modifying someone else’s theme. But, while that probably clinched it, there were other good reasons too:

Since I’ve moved back to using vim+tmux in the terminal for virtually all my writing and code editing (and gotten faster in a number of respects), one of the key things I’ve missed from Sublime Text 3 has been its excellent and speedy markdown preview in Chrome.

It was a friction point in moving back to terminal vim since an old plugin I’d used before was no longer available, and the fallback I’d had to render Github-flavoured markdown was to use a combination of Tim Pope’s Dispatch and the octodown gem . It had a number of issues, one of which was the time it took to shell out and then render the preview, but more than that, it just seemed to slow everything down.

A few weeks ago, two of our officemates (this guy and this guy ) did a Level Up Lunch on visual notetaking and the Bullet Journal technique.

I like to think I am someone who seriously get things done, but I have to admit I was struck by the simplicity and clarity of the system and the possibility that even while I am great at getting things done with Taskpaper , I do recognize that I still pile things into and roll things forward into future weeks arbitrarily, often just removing the problem I had with days getting overloaded with other systems, to future weeks with Taskpaper. I really liked the idea of the Monthly versus Daily calendaring, as well as the Event logging that seemed inherent in bullet journaling. And, well… it’s always good to shake things up, so I decided to take the plunge. I’m on the cusp of the 45 day mark, so I felt I should share my findings so far.