Tools

NixOS is a chore

Using nixos is a chore like brushing your teeth. Oh... I mean "teeth being brushed" (declarative).

It takes work. A big investment up front in configuring it and tiny investments for as long as you use it to maintain the configuration. Sounds like a scam but I thank myself for this investment every time there is a bad update or running a project with a flake and having it work fine after many years of sitting idle (which is suprising in the modern norm of having a web of dependencies). This brings an insane amount of confidence in any change I make to my system which lets me explore more things without being afraid touching the wrong thing on MY computer.

I've had it running as a daily driver for about 6 years and on my home server (just an old laptop) for more than a year. My review: 10/10, do it.

Kakoune supremacy

I've tried a bunch of different code editors and IDEs over the years but nothing beats the control of a modal text editor. Even as "vi plugins" in normie editors and IDEs, the difference in user experience is massive. But I've come to crave more from my tools. By "more" I mean fewer features and better primitives to allow me to build my own experience on top of it. Because at the end of the day, I've spend a considerable amount of time using the tools that I use for work and as a hobby so I know better than the devs of these tools what I'd like my tool to do.

For a while my answer to this was neovim (vim before that). Neovim is a really solid code editor and it comes with the simplest and a really powerful configuration framework for building on top of it (emacs guys suck it (jk, I love emacs too)). I dove so deep into the lua rabit-hole that I trimmed my setup down to a few essential plugins and every other feature was implemented by me in my config. But over time, I've felt like the foundations are a bit "off". The primitives that it provides felt a bit inconsistent and like carrying too much weight for my taste.

So as any mentally ill person would, I decided to spend a shit-load of time setting up a kakoune configuration that I could use many moons ago. And it just made sense. Kakoune's shell based extension framework is exactly the kind of simplicity that I was looking for. It is in no way a perfect editor but it fits in my hands perfectly. No file explorer, no build system, no fancy built-in language server, no split windows, etc. Nothing other than a simple code editor with a good-enough configuration language that lets you integrate kakoune with any other tool you want. I have unix blood in my veins. This kind of workflow turns my terminal into an IDE with the editor just being a part of it (instead of the other way around. Looking at you, emacs). I still love neovim and might go back to it in the future but kakoune feels right for now.

My crotch has never been wetter. Kthanxby.