4 ms·
> 1 hour/day efficiency gain = 1 month saved per year The idea that some terminal tweaks (theme, shell, tooling, etc) can save you an hour a day is pretty outl
by abound 3y ago
> 1 hour/day efficiency gain = 1 month saved per year
The idea that some terminal tweaks (theme, shell, tooling, etc) can save you an hour a day is pretty outlandish. It also doesn't seem to be accounting for all the time setting things up, configuring it, debugging it, and learning how to use it (e.g flags for ripgrep when you do want hidden files, key bindings for mcfly, etc)
My alternative approach would be to be _aware_ of the tools in a given space, but start with the dumbest, simplest workflow and only introduce a new tool when the friction of not-using it crosses some annoyance threshold.
I say this as someone who lives in a terminal (using fish, atuin, Zellij, Helix, etc), but adopted those tools one by one as made sense.
- Zambyte 3y agoThat is pretty much my approach to improving my workflow also. My setup looks like I spend all my time configuring and tweaking things, but really at this point I spend somewhere on the order of a couple hours a year onboarding new tools. I have asymptotically approached an ideal configuration for myself, and as I get closer and closer, I spend less and less time configuring.
- eviks 3y agoWhy would you pick a path ripe with annoyances when you can adopt a more pleasant workflow where those annoyances are already fixed?
- abound 3y agoThere are a lot of ways one can answer this question: - Because the base path isn't necessarily full of annoyances, just things that may not jive with your workflow. But you won't know that until you run up against it - "More pleasant workflows" usually comes at the cost of additional or more featureful/complicated tooling. The cognitive overhead or time spent setting up/learning these tools might dwarf the savings you get - Adopting a premade package of pleasant workflows might include a lot of cruft you don't need. Starting from "scratch" means you understand why you added all the things you did
- eviks 3y ago1. we do know that it is because at this point generations of other people have shared their experience about how bad the defaults are. Why ignore it? 2. how is this different vs. what you're suggesting? You're just adding this complicated tooling piecemeal after getting annoyed instead of before 3. Just ignore cruft until it annoys you? What's the downside of it otherwise existing? And understanding can be gained from reading the docs/blogs like this, for example, "zsh-syntax-highlighting - Highlights the commands you type to tell you if its valid or not." Does this not answer "why"?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoThis is how I did my emacs config. Start with basically vanilla, and about once a month I'd pick the one thing that annoyed me the most over the last month and fix it. Solved a problem where I'd go on binges of installing and configuring 18 packages, and then not take the time to learn any one of them very well. Generating a lot of time spent reading docs and looking up keybinds when trying to work.