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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 th
by 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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!