5 ms·

I used to be like this... crazy about dotfiles, backgrounds, shortcuts, apps, etc. Eventually, I learned that I'm better off with the standard setup and little

I used to be like this... crazy about dotfiles, backgrounds, shortcuts, apps, etc. Eventually, I learned that I'm better off with the standard setup and little customization. No fancy aliases, no recorded dotfiles, no crazy editor configuration, nothing. If I get a new computer or am using someone else's even, it's easy for me to install what I need as I need it and get going out of the box.

adtac 9y ago
IMO that's a bad trade-off. You're going to be using your personal computer more than the time you spend switching computers. In that case it makes sense to customize your set up to fit you. How often do you get a new computer?
- jacobush 9y ago
  True for most people, but I have been in situations where I got new Windows machines pretty often. Then I learned to just suppress my itch to customize and just the darn thing. Now I am my Mac since a few years and also transferred the whole thing once from a TimeMachine backup, so I customize. Though that list of the OP... SO MANY APPS?! I get weak knees just from scanning that list. Though several I may pick, like the Focus app and maybe a few others.
  - suprfnk 9y ago
    > Though several I may pick, like the Focus app and maybe a few others. And when you're used to those apps, you might pick up a few more here and there. And a few more. And in a while you'll have a list just like the one linked.
  - hnlmorg 9y ago
    This is the primary reason why I stopped using Windows. The defaults wound me up rotten and after a fresh install it would take me hours (literally) to configure Windows to run the way I liked my workflow. It just got worse and worse with each new version of Windows pushing itself further and further away from my ideal workflow. But with Linux, as much as I have my preferences with desktop environments et al, I found I could more easily work with whatever was put in front of me (after all, if all else fails I can just fallback to Bash). So I gave up fighting Windows and just switched to Linux full time. This was around 15/20 years ago now and I do have a custom Bash profile and custom tmux config. The tmux config never needs to leave my workstation but the bash profile gets copied onto each server the moment I SSH onto it (as I've aliased SSH to do this) so that means I have a familiar environment on remote systems with zero extra maintenance.
    - jwandborg 9y ago
      Copying your bash-profile is good as long as soon as you're _the_ user on that server, or when you have separate users for all users of the server. At my work, we all use the same user for ssh (uid 1000), for all servers, for all projects. It's a good opportunity to exercise mode-switching when switching from (local) fish to (remote) bash and back again, and I'm happy both of fish, bash share the common readline bindings, it also makes it clear what kind of shell you're in if you're jumping back and forth between docs, manpages and shells. I have one itch, fish and bash do word-boundaries differently when deleting with Ctrl-W (delete word). bash even does word-boundaries different from Ctrl-W when using Meta-D (delete word in front).
      - hnlmorg 9y ago
        I don't know your specific set up so I don't want to come across as preachy but it's not generally good practice to have everyone using the same UID. I know for a fact we would fail our regular PCI and gambling commission audits if we did that but even for businesses that don't need that kind of regulation, sharing a UID means you're sharing passwords / private keys which seems a major security breach just waiting to happen (eg what happens when someone leaves the team?)
        irishsultan 9y ago
        You don't need to share private keys or passwords to share a UID, each person can have his or her own public key in .ssh/authorized_keys Of course I agree that this is still bad practice from an auditing perspective (and assuming a password is needed to su/sudo you do need to share that password).
        hnlmorg 9y ago
        Good point about authorized_keys, I'd forgotten about that.
- 4ad 9y ago
  No way, in the day of cloud infrastructure I use far more other computers than my computer. And the other computers I use change all the time.
kornish 9y ago
Why not get the best of both worlds? Spend time tinkering to find force multipliers, then throw those dotfiles or Brewfile or installation scripts into a git repo and it's all a `git clone` away. What works for you certainly works for you, of course; it's just worth noting that there exists a very productive middle ground in which one can use tools without spending an unproductive amount of time on hyperconfiguration.
- bluejekyll 9y ago
  Yeah. I've started doing this. Warning though, make sure to use a private repo. It keeps two my macs and Linux systems all in sync. I knew someone who accidentally uploaded their AWS credentials to a public repo; that was a huge shitshow.
- bluejekyll 9y ago
  Yeah. I've started doing this. Warning though, make sure to use a private repo. I knew someone who accidentally uploaded their AWS credentials to a public repo; that was a huge shitshow.(btw, don't put cress in repos at all, but at least a private repowill give you a buffer)
pjmlp 9y ago
Same here. Oh the days trying out every WM under the Sun. Nowadays on Windows I do a few customization, like showing file extensions, enabling a separate process for each explorer Window and a few other things and that's about it. On GNU/Linux, I have long settled on whatever is the default WM for the respective distribution.
keithpeter 9y ago
The Rob Pike approach https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ I'm coming round to it (at a considerably less exalted level).
- antaviana 9y ago
  What I do is the VDI approach. I have one AWS Windows instance with and I RDP to it from any of my computers at home, the office or any of my second homes, which happen to be iMacs but could be anything.
  - swah 9y ago
    I'd love to do something like this but I'm 150ms away from cheap VPSes.. Do you even watch Youtube (say) inside the instance??
    - antaviana 9y ago
      If I do not have fiber or my ISP is having a bad day, using my phone G4 as a personal Hotspot I get some 80 ms. I use USB instead of wifi to save 5ms. To save some money, I shutdown the AWS instance when I do not need it because it starts up in seconds. For web browsing I often use the local browser because with Macs swiching the current desktop is just a key stroke away (which is not the case for W10 if one of those desktops is the RDP client.
  - ajsalminen 9y ago
    How's the latency for text editing? I tried doing something like this with *nix tools but found it unbearable even when connecting to localhost.
    - antaviana 9y ago
      In my case it is indistinguisable from local text editing. I remember however that I chose to turn off SublimeText scrolling animations because it was a way worse than locally. My fiber latency to my AWS instance is about 60ms and with phone 4G about 80ms.
inDigiNeous 9y ago
Yeah this guy is pretty crazy with the automation and keyboard shortcut apps, I mean 3 different apps for automating keyboard shortcuts or other automation ? I mean it's a good idea, but I prefer simplifying my own workflow so I can perform it without any external apps. I used like the idea of automating setting up a workspace, but now I like just to open up and close whatever I need at that moment, it really goes into your muscle memory after a while. Only thing I really customize is my programming environment, my vim setup is highly customized, also shell functions. But each to his own :)
arthurfm 9y ago
> If I get a new computer or am using someone else's even, it's easy for me to install what I need as I need it and get going out of the box. Mackup [1] might also be worth considering. It symlinks all of your config files to a supported storage location (Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, Git etc.) which enables you to either backup the settings or sync them between one or more other Macs. To restore your settings on a brand new Mac simply run "mackup restore". [1] https://github.com/lra/mackup https://github.com/lra/mackup
inopinatus 9y ago
I used to be a tinkerer, happily maintaining my own fork of, say, Rails. Or Postfix. Or the Linux kernel. It was tremendous fun and a great way to learn internals, but also a colossal time sink. I don't fight the platform anymore, I just use whatever's vanilla out of the box. And I'm actually a lot more productive as a result. I think it's more than okay to go through the tinkerer phase, it's one path to growing as a developer.
- organsnyder 9y ago
  My Linux distro progression was Linux From Scratch -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu... My personal laptop has been on Kubuntu LTS since I bought it seven years ago, and it works fine. My employer-provided laptop is a Mac, so I use MacOS there (with some tweaks, especially to get keyboard shortcuts for window management). My home desktop runs Windows 10 for gaming, but I find it fine for occasional dev work. Basically, I use whatever is in front of me, now. I seem to have gotten more flexible as I've gotten older.
conradev 9y ago
I had that philosophy for a long time, but I’ve since written a few bash scripts and put them in a git repo to automate the things I do frequently. I, too, try to stay close to the defaults, but I will change them if I feel strongly enough.
SingAlong 9y ago
I have an install.sh in my dot-files repo - https://github.com/HashNuke/dot-files/blob/master/install.sh https://github.com/HashNuke/dot-files/blob/master/install.sh (no secrets in this repo). Works for both my macbook and online workstation. Recently heard someone else's smarter idea. Put the dotfiles into a Dropbox dir and use symlinks. So updates auto-sync across computers. [EDIT: I think it was Kenneth Reitz that tweeted about his Dropbox setup]

adtac 9y ago

IMO that's a bad trade-off. You're going to be using your personal computer more than the time you spend switching computers. In that case it makes sense to customize your set up to fit you. How often do you get a new computer?

jacobush 9y ago
True for most people, but I have been in situations where I got new Windows machines pretty often. Then I learned to just suppress my itch to customize and just the darn thing. Now I am my Mac since a few years and also transferred the whole thing once from a TimeMachine backup, so I customize. Though that list of the OP... SO MANY APPS?! I get weak knees just from scanning that list. Though several I may pick, like the Focus app and maybe a few others.
- suprfnk 9y ago
  > Though several I may pick, like the Focus app and maybe a few others. And when you're used to those apps, you might pick up a few more here and there. And a few more. And in a while you'll have a list just like the one linked.
- hnlmorg 9y ago
  This is the primary reason why I stopped using Windows. The defaults wound me up rotten and after a fresh install it would take me hours (literally) to configure Windows to run the way I liked my workflow. It just got worse and worse with each new version of Windows pushing itself further and further away from my ideal workflow. But with Linux, as much as I have my preferences with desktop environments et al, I found I could more easily work with whatever was put in front of me (after all, if all else fails I can just fallback to Bash). So I gave up fighting Windows and just switched to Linux full time. This was around 15/20 years ago now and I do have a custom Bash profile and custom tmux config. The tmux config never needs to leave my workstation but the bash profile gets copied onto each server the moment I SSH onto it (as I've aliased SSH to do this) so that means I have a familiar environment on remote systems with zero extra maintenance.
  - jwandborg 9y ago
    Copying your bash-profile is good as long as soon as you're _the_ user on that server, or when you have separate users for all users of the server. At my work, we all use the same user for ssh (uid 1000), for all servers, for all projects. It's a good opportunity to exercise mode-switching when switching from (local) fish to (remote) bash and back again, and I'm happy both of fish, bash share the common readline bindings, it also makes it clear what kind of shell you're in if you're jumping back and forth between docs, manpages and shells. I have one itch, fish and bash do word-boundaries differently when deleting with Ctrl-W (delete word). bash even does word-boundaries different from Ctrl-W when using Meta-D (delete word in front).
    - hnlmorg 9y ago
      I don't know your specific set up so I don't want to come across as preachy but it's not generally good practice to have everyone using the same UID. I know for a fact we would fail our regular PCI and gambling commission audits if we did that but even for businesses that don't need that kind of regulation, sharing a UID means you're sharing passwords / private keys which seems a major security breach just waiting to happen (eg what happens when someone leaves the team?)
      - irishsultan 9y ago
        You don't need to share private keys or passwords to share a UID, each person can have his or her own public key in .ssh/authorized_keys Of course I agree that this is still bad practice from an auditing perspective (and assuming a password is needed to su/sudo you do need to share that password).
        hnlmorg 9y ago
        Good point about authorized_keys, I'd forgotten about that.
4ad 9y ago
No way, in the day of cloud infrastructure I use far more other computers than my computer. And the other computers I use change all the time.

kornish 9y ago

Why not get the best of both worlds? Spend time tinkering to find force multipliers, then throw those dotfiles or Brewfile or installation scripts into a git repo and it's all a `git clone` away. What works for you certainly works for you, of course; it's just worth noting that there exists a very productive middle ground in which one can use tools without spending an unproductive amount of time on hyperconfiguration.

bluejekyll 9y ago
Yeah. I've started doing this. Warning though, make sure to use a private repo. It keeps two my macs and Linux systems all in sync. I knew someone who accidentally uploaded their AWS credentials to a public repo; that was a huge shitshow.
bluejekyll 9y ago
Yeah. I've started doing this. Warning though, make sure to use a private repo. I knew someone who accidentally uploaded their AWS credentials to a public repo; that was a huge shitshow.(btw, don't put cress in repos at all, but at least a private repowill give you a buffer)

pjmlp 9y ago

Same here. Oh the days trying out every WM under the Sun. Nowadays on Windows I do a few customization, like showing file extensions, enabling a separate process for each explorer Window and a few other things and that's about it. On GNU/Linux, I have long settled on whatever is the default WM for the respective distribution.

keithpeter 9y ago

The Rob Pike approach https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ I'm coming round to it (at a considerably less exalted level).

antaviana 9y ago
What I do is the VDI approach. I have one AWS Windows instance with and I RDP to it from any of my computers at home, the office or any of my second homes, which happen to be iMacs but could be anything.
- swah 9y ago
  I'd love to do something like this but I'm 150ms away from cheap VPSes.. Do you even watch Youtube (say) inside the instance??
  - antaviana 9y ago
    If I do not have fiber or my ISP is having a bad day, using my phone G4 as a personal Hotspot I get some 80 ms. I use USB instead of wifi to save 5ms. To save some money, I shutdown the AWS instance when I do not need it because it starts up in seconds. For web browsing I often use the local browser because with Macs swiching the current desktop is just a key stroke away (which is not the case for W10 if one of those desktops is the RDP client.
- ajsalminen 9y ago
  How's the latency for text editing? I tried doing something like this with *nix tools but found it unbearable even when connecting to localhost.
  - antaviana 9y ago
    In my case it is indistinguisable from local text editing. I remember however that I chose to turn off SublimeText scrolling animations because it was a way worse than locally. My fiber latency to my AWS instance is about 60ms and with phone 4G about 80ms.

inDigiNeous 9y ago

Yeah this guy is pretty crazy with the automation and keyboard shortcut apps, I mean 3 different apps for automating keyboard shortcuts or other automation ? I mean it's a good idea, but I prefer simplifying my own workflow so I can perform it without any external apps. I used like the idea of automating setting up a workspace, but now I like just to open up and close whatever I need at that moment, it really goes into your muscle memory after a while. Only thing I really customize is my programming environment, my vim setup is highly customized, also shell functions. But each to his own :)

arthurfm 9y ago

> If I get a new computer or am using someone else's even, it's easy for me to install what I need as I need it and get going out of the box. Mackup [1] might also be worth considering. It symlinks all of your config files to a supported storage location (Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, Git etc.) which enables you to either backup the settings or sync them between one or more other Macs. To restore your settings on a brand new Mac simply run "mackup restore". [1] https://github.com/lra/mackup https://github.com/lra/mackup

inopinatus 9y ago

I used to be a tinkerer, happily maintaining my own fork of, say, Rails. Or Postfix. Or the Linux kernel. It was tremendous fun and a great way to learn internals, but also a colossal time sink. I don't fight the platform anymore, I just use whatever's vanilla out of the box. And I'm actually a lot more productive as a result. I think it's more than okay to go through the tinkerer phase, it's one path to growing as a developer.

organsnyder 9y ago
My Linux distro progression was Linux From Scratch -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu... My personal laptop has been on Kubuntu LTS since I bought it seven years ago, and it works fine. My employer-provided laptop is a Mac, so I use MacOS there (with some tweaks, especially to get keyboard shortcuts for window management). My home desktop runs Windows 10 for gaming, but I find it fine for occasional dev work. Basically, I use whatever is in front of me, now. I seem to have gotten more flexible as I've gotten older.

conradev 9y ago

I had that philosophy for a long time, but I’ve since written a few bash scripts and put them in a git repo to automate the things I do frequently. I, too, try to stay close to the defaults, but I will change them if I feel strongly enough.

SingAlong 9y ago

I have an install.sh in my dot-files repo - https://github.com/HashNuke/dot-files/blob/master/install.sh https://github.com/HashNuke/dot-files/blob/master/install.sh (no secrets in this repo). Works for both my macbook and online workstation. Recently heard someone else's smarter idea. Put the dotfiles into a Dropbox dir and use symlinks. So updates auto-sync across computers. [EDIT: I think it was Kenneth Reitz that tweeted about his Dropbox setup]