Focus

Emacs is elegant and seductive: it is indeed a really sophisticated way to use your computer and I’ve acquired a lot of preferences and tastes in the way that I work cause of how emacs facilitates them for the user.

However, I’ve been missing the unix philosophy lately, and living in the CLI was a source of a distinct sort of zen for me around half a decade ago.

So, my current workstation Mac is vanilla nvim + tmux + pi coding agent + firefox.
My experimental base is a GUI-less tty only (tmux, vim, w3m, man pages) NixOs Thinkpad.

If you’re new to the concept of polymathy (I personally ventured into the idea when I read Da Vinci’s biography by Walter Isaacson), a lot of counter-intuitive traps await you when trying to build competence in multiple areas.

You don’t need to be a generalist at all times during your journey into polymathy. I mentally grasped this fairly recently that you don’t need to shun specializing for smaller durations. Something like a day is obvious as a candidate but, in the past, I would shy away from even periods of a month to actually focus on a singular thing. I’m fairly comfortable doing that for upto three months now but would recommend touching a large span of domains over the span of six months for you don’t want to start losing out on the humility that interdisciplinary pursuits enforce on you.