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:
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git is an amazing tool for tracking changes that researchers should use more
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don’t blindly edit stuff—-dotfiles in this particular case—-on your computer without understanding what those edits mean
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Solarized should be your default color theme for anything
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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.
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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.