When Hammers Don’t Hammer 🔨
I switched from MacOS to Linux in 2017 and vowed to never go back.
But I’m going back.
Ethically and philosophically, I love GNU Linux, Unix and it’s BSD flavors, open source software and terminal-based programs.
There’s been an ongoing problem, though:
The tools I thought would help with efficiency and simplifying workflows have done the opposite - they’ve made everything complicated and inefficient.
The tools were getting in the way of the work.
The hammers weren’t hammering.
I spent so much time reading documentation, tweaking and documenting my setup and trying to learn and use my software stack that I wasn’t doing much actual work.
This is not an indictment of the software. It’s really not you, it’s me.
It became a source of anxiety and stress until I realized I was doing this to myself and gave up cold turkey.
I’m writing this in SimpleNote on a 2018 iPad Pro while listening to Tunnel of Love by Dire Straits via the Decoupled app on an iPhone 12 Pro.
Previously, it would’ve been written on a heavily modded Thinkpad X61 in Neovim and vimwiki, synced to a de-googled Pixel4a and Galaxy Tab s5e via Syncthing while listening to music via ncmpcpp and maybe, if I didn’t getting distracted by tweaking something, it would’ve been posted here.
I’ve gotten more done since switching back to imperfect, less efficient gui-driven apps than I ever did with “efficient, low-bloat” terminal programs.
I still fantasize (fetishize?) about creating efficient TUI/CLI-based workflows, but that’ll have to wait for another day (never?).
Instead, I’m going to let the hammer do the hammering, finish the job, and put it back into the tool chest and get back to livin'. I've got more important things to do now.