Spending two hours each day on the train, offline and without distractions, gives me an excuse to go down various rabbit holes that a couple of months ago I would've thought nothing but time wasters. Starting to read the Dark Tower series---I'm almost done with the Gunslinger---is one of them. Re-learning vim---if dabbling with it in high school 15 years ago counts as having learned it---is another.

This episode of the Technical Difficulties podcast is what started it, followed by a blog post or two (nay, three) on the perfect setup. Now, I may or may not continue using vim as my primary writting tool---I would have to figure out how to integrate it into my workflow---but several things I picked up will always be useful:

• git is an amazing tool for tracking changes that researchers should use more

• don't blindly edit stuff---dotfiles in this particular case---on your computer without understanding what those edits mean

• Solarized should be your default color theme for anything

• use your macro/keyboard shortcut app of choice (mine is Keyboard Maestro, you can just as easily---but not as prettily---use Better Touch Tools) to quickly position windows into quadrants, halves, thirds, etc.

• there might not be much difference between bash and zsh if you are a beginner, but zsh has the cool customizable prompts

Yes, I am writing this in vim, previewing and exporting in Marked, then posting it manually to Squarespace. The only thing standing between me and a fancy-pants static website engine powering this blog is there being no internet access on MARC trains, and me being too cheap to get a $20-a-month personal hotspot from Spring. That is probably for the best.