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      7 <title>On digital minimalism, Linux, NixOS and Emacs</title>
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     19 <h1 class="title">On digital minimalism, Linux, NixOS and Emacs</h1>
     20 </header><section id="outline-container-Introduction" class="outline-2">
     21 <h2 id="Introduction">Introduction</h2>
     22 <div class="outline-text-2" id="text-Introduction">
     23 <p>
     24 I&rsquo;ve been reading and listening about Minimalism and Digital Minimalism for a little while
     25 now. I&rsquo;ve watch some <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ24N4O0bP7LGLBDvye7oCA">Matt D&rsquo;Avella</a> youtube video (and documentary), read <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimalism">Digital
     26 Minimalism</a> from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/147891.Cal_Newport">Cal Newport</a>, and read a bunch of <a href="#Links">articles and blog posts</a>.
     27 </p>
     28 
     29 <p>
     30 I wouldn&rsquo;t say I am a minimalist, neither am I a digital minimalist <b>but</b> it is something
     31 that is a bit appealing and I feel I am slowly taking inspiration from those. I&rsquo;ve started
     32 reducing to a minimun what my <i>smart</i>-phone does, I&rsquo;ve reduced the number of <i>gadgets</i>
     33 I&rsquo;ve add over time. But in this posts, I am going to focus on my systems and tools — this
     34 means Linux distributions, Emacs and other tools.
     35 </p>
     36 </div>
     37 </section>
     38 <section id="outline-container-A%20little%20bit%20of%20history%20%28or%20context%29" class="outline-2">
     39 <h2 id="A%20little%20bit%20of%20history%20%28or%20context%29">A little bit of history (or context)</h2>
     40 <div class="outline-text-2" id="text-A%20little%20bit%20of%20history%20%28or%20context%29">
     41 <p>
     42 I&rsquo;ve been using GNU/Linux for ages now. It has been around 22 years now that I discovered
     43 Red Hat<sup><a id="fnr.1" class="footref" href="#fn.1" role="doc-backlink">1</a></sup> Linux, 5.2 at the time. I&rsquo;ve use it as my primary operating system almost
     44 ever sync. During that time, I&rsquo;ve tried so many distribution: from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandriva_Linux">Mandrake</a> (later
     45 Mandriva), to <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> (3.0 -&gt; 9.0 on some servers) and <a href="https://www.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu</a> (on the first ever public
     46 release), with a long time on <a href="https://gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> and later <a href="https://www.archlinux.org/">Archlinux</a>. I&rsquo;ve used Gnome, KDE, wmii,
     47 XMonad, awesome-vm. I&rsquo;ve used bash, zsh, fish, switching from one to another multiple
     48 times. I&rsquo;ve used Emacs, vim, IntelliJ, Eclipse, VSCode… My gentoo/archlinux days made me
     49 try and <i>use</i> a lot of tools (screen, tmux, …) and customization.
     50 </p>
     51 
     52 <p>
     53 I had the habit to customize everything, down to the theme and icons I use. There was a
     54 time where I would patch and re-package some GTK themes and icons set. <b>I had to
     55 customize everything</b>, that was my learning experience. I would often break things and
     56 have to re-install the system — and <b>it was fun</b> 😎.
     57 </p>
     58 
     59 <p>
     60 But the more I <i>grew</i>, the more I worked for different companies, the less time I had to
     61 do this. I was also learning a lot about tests, reproducibility at that time. My <i>will</i> to
     62 customization and <i>instability</i> slowly faded, I wanted to be able to focus on what
     63 mattered, and not loose time on silly things that I would break soon after making it.
     64 </p>
     65 </div>
     66 </section>
     67 <section id="outline-container-Minimalism%20and%20Digital%20Mininalism" class="outline-2">
     68 <h2 id="Minimalism%20and%20Digital%20Mininalism">Minimalism and Digital Mininalism</h2>
     69 <div class="outline-text-2" id="text-Minimalism%20and%20Digital%20Mininalism">
     70 <p>
     71 Let&rsquo;s try to define really quick what is minimalism and digital minimalism about.Digital
     72 minimalism is Minimalism in the digital world, and <a href="https://www.theminimalists.com/minimalism/">minimalism</a> can be seen as <a href="https://jamesstuber.com/minimalism-as-a-framework/">a Framework
     73 for Decision Making</a>.
     74 </p>
     75 
     76 <blockquote>
     77 <p>
     78 Every decision we make is constrained by limited resources. Money, materials, energy. Even
     79 the richest man in the world is limited by time, and has to make decisions accordingly.
     80 </p>
     81 
     82 <p>
     83 Here are some factors that make minimalism well suited for decision making:
     84 </p>
     85 
     86 <ul class="org-ul">
     87 <li>Practicing minimalism helps develop an improved ability to discern what’s important and
     88 what’s not</li>
     89 <li>It becomes easier to let go of ‘sort of important’ things</li>
     90 <li>What you choose to keep is a reflection of your values</li>
     91 </ul>
     92 </blockquote>
     93 
     94 <p>
     95 In a gist, Digital Minimalism is about making conscious choice of what you use and what
     96 you do in the digital world, a world of abundance (information, software, …).
     97 </p>
     98 
     99 <p>
    100 Let&rsquo;s take two examples: our desktops and our phones.
    101 </p>
    102 
    103 <p>
    104 On desktop, digital minimalism can be something like the follow blog post : <a href="http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2014/07/anti-dashboard-manifesto.html">Tech Notes:
    105 The Anti-Dashboard Manifesto</a>.
    106 </p>
    107 
    108 <blockquote>
    109 <p>
    110 Now take that reasoning further: It&rsquo;s not useful to reserve a portion of my screen for
    111 displaying which applications are running, as the things that are running are visible and
    112 the things that aren&rsquo;t visible can be found when necessary. There&rsquo;s no need for an icon
    113 displaying wifi status; if I&rsquo;m connected it&rsquo;s uninteresting and if I&rsquo;m not connected I&rsquo;ll
    114 surely discover it if I attempt to use the internet.
    115 </p>
    116 
    117 <p>
    118 I took this reasoning to its conclusion. I run my computers with the screen blank except
    119 for the apps I run, and the apps I run I configure to display a minimal amount of
    120 information. I think of this as being anti-dashboard: against the cognitive clutter of
    121 extraneous information. My computer is not a cockpit and I am at my best when I&rsquo;m only
    122 thinking about the single task at hand.
    123 </p>
    124 </blockquote>
    125 
    126 <p>
    127 This is taking things a little bit too far for me <b>but</b> it does resonate with me, and as
    128 you&rsquo;ll see in the following articles (and on my configuration), I share some of Evan&rsquo;s
    129 belief. By default, my desktop do only show a background (be an image or a color) and
    130 anything related to time, battery and other status is a keybinding away (the <code>Win</code> key).
    131 </p>
    132 
    133 <p>
    134 And on the phone: <a href="https://robertheaton.com/2020/03/18/yourself-happier-iphone-worse/">How to make yourself happier by making your iPhone worse | Robert Heaton</a>
    135 — which I followed almost word for word, but this isn&rsquo;t the subject of this post.
    136 </p>
    137 </div>
    138 </section>
    139 <section id="outline-container-Emacs%2C%20Nix%2C%20NixOS%2C%20%3Dhome-manager%3D%20and%20other%20tools" class="outline-2">
    140 <h2 id="Emacs%2C%20Nix%2C%20NixOS%2C%20%3Dhome-manager%3D%20and%20other%20tools">Emacs, Nix, NixOS, <code>home-manager</code> and other tools</h2>
    141 <div class="outline-text-2" id="text-Emacs%2C%20Nix%2C%20NixOS%2C%20%3Dhome-manager%3D%20and%20other%20tools">
    142 <p>
    143 How a GNU/Linux distribution like NixOS comes into this. First, let&rsquo;s see what I want :
    144 </p>
    145 
    146 <ul class="org-ul">
    147 <li>A system that is tailored to my needs, that makes me efficient.</li>
    148 <li>A system that is customizable, to answer the previous item. I want to be able to modify
    149 the default behavior if it doesn&rsquo;t suit me.</li>
    150 <li>A system that is reproductible and easy to replicate. If I change my hardware, or if I
    151 need to re-install my system for <i>any reason</i>.</li>
    152 <li>A way to share configuration on my infra. This is probably the developer speaking, but I
    153 want to write something once and re-use it several times.</li>
    154 <li>A developer environment that is reproductible, on-demand and <i>safe</i>.</li>
    155 <li>Use defaults of the software I use as much as possible. This one is tricky to achiev for
    156 several reasons:
    157 <ul class="org-ul">
    158 <li>I am used to customize everything (<i>easy to fix</i>)</li>
    159 <li>I use a custom keyboard layout (<a href="https://bepo.fr">bepo</a>), so if I go with default keybinding, I will have
    160 the wrong <i>muscle memory</i> (and they could be not optimized either)</li>
    161 </ul></li>
    162 <li>Hackable tools that I can manipulate as I want.</li>
    163 <li>Use the right tool at the right time, trying not to reinvent the wheel.</li>
    164 </ul>
    165 
    166 <p>
    167 As it turns out Nix and NixOS are giving all the components required for my <i>almost</i> ideal
    168 setup.
    169 </p>
    170 
    171 <p>
    172 If you complete that with a <i>not really minimalist</i> editor, called <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/">GNU Emacs</a>, you&rsquo;ve got a
    173 pretty composable system without leaving Emacs. I&rsquo;ll dig more into my Emacs configuration
    174 and my NixOS setup in different posts — and on the <a href="https://vincent.demeester.fr/configurations/"><code>configurations</code></a> pages — but my take
    175 lately is to try to do with what is available (as built-in, in Emacs for example). After
    176 reading the docs, if it&rsquo;s not sufficient, I may look for an external module or tool.
    177 </p>
    178 </div>
    179 </section>
    180 <section id="outline-container-Conclusion" class="outline-2">
    181 <h2 id="Conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
    182 <div class="outline-text-2" id="text-Conclusion">
    183 <p>
    184 This was a weird post that mixes up tooling, minimalism and thoughts. It&rsquo;s definitely not
    185 what I initially envisioned. But I&rsquo;m hoping it introduce a bit my take on things.
    186 </p>
    187 </div>
    188 </section>
    189 <section id="outline-container-Links" class="outline-2">
    190 <h2 id="Links">Links</h2>
    191 <div class="outline-text-2" id="text-Links">
    192 <ul class="org-ul">
    193 <li><a href="http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2014/07/anti-dashboard-manifesto.html">Tech Notes: The Anti-Dashboard Manifesto</a></li>
    194 <li><a href="https://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/digital-minimalism-for-the-working-hacker.html">Subset Park: Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker</a></li>
    195 <li><a href="https://jamesstuber.com/minimalism-as-a-framework/">Minimalism as a Framework for Decision Making | JamesStuber.com</a></li>
    196 <li><a href="https://robertheaton.com/2020/03/18/yourself-happier-iphone-worse/">How to make yourself happier by making your iPhone worse | Robert Heaton</a></li>
    197 </ul>
    198 </div>
    199 </section>
    200 <div id="footnotes">
    201 <h2 class="footnotes">Footnotes: </h2>
    202 <div id="text-footnotes">
    203 
    204 <div class="footdef"><sup><a id="fn.1" class="footnum" href="#fnr.1" role="doc-backlink">1</a></sup> <div class="footpara" role="doc-footnote"><p class="footpara">
    205 And I now work for Red Hat Inc., what a journey 😝
    206 </p></div></div>
    207 
    208 
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