Tooling

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.

From time to time, I pick up a long running swe experiment : one where I choose to iteratively explore a domain by playing around with the ecosystem and tooling available. This is such a common occurence now that I’ve begun implicitly templatizing this process.

Surf a little, and this pops up: polylith : an optimal (at a first glance and first use and consequent uses and reglances and meditations as well) way of separating concerns in a monorepo, while allowing for rapid experimentation.

Fabric¹ is a collection of crowd-sourced prompts, exposed via a CLI tool. I used it for a while some time ago but never fully exploited it because I prefer Emacs.

Eshell buffers are an option, but I am principled in my tool usage and prefer to delegate longer-running CLI tasks to a combination of Alacritty and Tmux.

Maintaining my Emacs shell usage to ephemeral popups feels natural.

Gptel² is a versatile LLM client that integrates smoothly into my workflow (buffer/text manipulation and management) without disrupting my thought flow.