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To me, true minimalism on my desktop came from stopping messing around with different window managers, IDEs, whatever to try to maximize my experience. Specifi

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’t have some super-enlightened workflow where everything is in terminal or has keybinds or something. But more importantly, I’m not continually wasting time on changing my env and adding complexity.

staplers 9y ago
Try Spotify in Firefox. Even simpler.
- endisukaj 9y ago
  And enable DRM in my web browser? No thank you.
walshemj 9y ago
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.
- walshemj 9y ago
  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
  - sweeneyrod 9y ago
    No, just a lot of people who like punctuation.
freehunter 9y ago
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 someone else’s machine. And then I became a consultant and was logging into someone else’s machine every day, often when I couldn’t install any customizations at all. I learned to love bash as-is, and vim as-is. And my custom launcher stopped working, so I switched back to the default Android launcher. And then my work gave me an iPhone that I couldn’t customize. And suddenly I was spending more time working and less time customizing and my productivity shot through the roof. All I had to do was stop seeking things to make me work better and actually just start working. And in addition to higher productivity, I now had more free time in the day because my work got done faster. It really is freeing in a Zen-like fashion to just use a tool as-is and not constantly wonder how you could make it 5% better or 3% faster.
- auto 9y ago
  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.
  - cygned 9y ago
    :set rnu nu All I need to get started.
- elevation 9y ago
  I got fed up hand-tweaking my environment, but instead of forgoing creature comforts, I started managing my laptop exclusively through configuration management and version control. When I got a second laptop last year, within an hour it had my python development tools, desktop wallpaper, browser plugins, wifi passwords, and the master branches of my most recent git repos cloned into $HOME. No more taking weeks to hunt down all the tweaks and utilities I need. Automation takes effort, but having a consistent reproducible environment has been well worth the effort!
rollcat 9y ago
Recently I've had the opposite experience, trying to un-customise my Emacs config. First I've tried mg. Nope, back to Emacs. Then I've tried no init file at all, but the defaults were really driving me crazy. I've tried Spacemacs in Evil mode. It's an amazing and very polished package, and so many things just make better sense... But the Vi editing style is just not for me, I needed to get stuff done and muscle memory was getting in my way. Next I've tried Spacemacs without Evil, and then Prelude, and both were quite decent, except I was missing maybe half a dozen of my most common tweaks... Like C-x C-a to call align-regexp. When I started copying over just the bits from my old config that I needed the most... And turning off some of the more annoying stuff in Prelude (eg. I dislike both helm and ido)... Look, we're back to square 1. I went back to my old config that I've been tweaking endlessly for over a decade. I finally feel productive again.
mxstbr 9y ago
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 https://github.com/mxstbr/dotfiles/blob/master/vimrc

staplers 9y ago

Try Spotify in Firefox. Even simpler.

endisukaj 9y ago
And enable DRM in my web browser? No thank you.

walshemj 9y ago

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.

walshemj 9y ago
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
- sweeneyrod 9y ago
  No, just a lot of people who like punctuation.

freehunter 9y ago

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 someone else’s machine. And then I became a consultant and was logging into someone else’s machine every day, often when I couldn’t install any customizations at all. I learned to love bash as-is, and vim as-is. And my custom launcher stopped working, so I switched back to the default Android launcher. And then my work gave me an iPhone that I couldn’t customize. And suddenly I was spending more time working and less time customizing and my productivity shot through the roof. All I had to do was stop seeking things to make me work better and actually just start working. And in addition to higher productivity, I now had more free time in the day because my work got done faster. It really is freeing in a Zen-like fashion to just use a tool as-is and not constantly wonder how you could make it 5% better or 3% faster.

auto 9y ago
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.
- cygned 9y ago
  :set rnu nu All I need to get started.
elevation 9y ago
I got fed up hand-tweaking my environment, but instead of forgoing creature comforts, I started managing my laptop exclusively through configuration management and version control. When I got a second laptop last year, within an hour it had my python development tools, desktop wallpaper, browser plugins, wifi passwords, and the master branches of my most recent git repos cloned into $HOME. No more taking weeks to hunt down all the tweaks and utilities I need. Automation takes effort, but having a consistent reproducible environment has been well worth the effort!

rollcat 9y ago

Recently I've had the opposite experience, trying to un-customise my Emacs config. First I've tried mg. Nope, back to Emacs. Then I've tried no init file at all, but the defaults were really driving me crazy. I've tried Spacemacs in Evil mode. It's an amazing and very polished package, and so many things just make better sense... But the Vi editing style is just not for me, I needed to get stuff done and muscle memory was getting in my way. Next I've tried Spacemacs without Evil, and then Prelude, and both were quite decent, except I was missing maybe half a dozen of my most common tweaks... Like C-x C-a to call align-regexp. When I started copying over just the bits from my old config that I needed the most... And turning off some of the more annoying stuff in Prelude (eg. I dislike both helm and ido)... Look, we're back to square 1. I went back to my old config that I've been tweaking endlessly for over a decade. I finally feel productive again.

mxstbr 9y ago

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 https://github.com/mxstbr/dotfiles/blob/master/vimrc