The Uncarved Block

People who I work with are often bemused by the perculiar setup I have on my machine, which is the product of constant evolution over the last five years or so. My setup is designed to work well for me, not to look pretty or provide distraction. As such, it can be thought of as sort of the opposite of desktop environments like Gnome. The other thing about my setup is that it is designed first and foremost to be fast and as such programs which are slow to start, slow to run or consume a lot of memory are completely out. For this reason, over the years I have ditched the emacs family of editors, fancy window managers and silly meta-environments like Gnome. People who use vim tend to look productive and slightly wired like this:

Whereas emacs users have been known to look like this:

I think that proves my point nicely.

I also use a text-mode web browser where I can because it is quick to start up and makes it quick to find information. Time-wasting web browsing of sites entirely devoid of real information I still do with a graphical browser, however. I have found that as computers that I use have become faster and more powerful, my desire for speed has increased so I am even more obsessed with small, fast apps than I used to be.

The Goals of my setup are straightforward:

• Small memory footprint
• Fast
• Flexible
• Productive
• Maximise available resources (desktop area etc)

Apps I use

• Linux - Let's not kid ourselves. I'm much more productive in Linux than I am elsewhere.
• The vim editor - As a programmer your editor is your most important tool and vim is by far and away the best there is (for me anyway). Nowdays I tend to use neovim rather than old-school vim but they're very similar
• The zsh shell - The zsh shell is a pretty productive environment for me, but the jury is still out on this for me. I don't mind bash either as long as I can use vi keybindings.
• The i3 window manager- The X window manager which allows you to do away with your mouse and means you are forever liberated from dragging and resizing and using the annoying mouse.
• tmux - some time ago I ditched gnu screen for this and it's great. The one feature of screen that I miss is the ability to have shared sessions that are not always viewing the same pane. nbd though find it on google. Screen is cool though.
• Scripting languages - noone is productive on unix without being able to write little scripts. As well as the shell, I love scripting in Perl, sed (sometimes) and Python.