Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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Long week with a lot of interesting programming and reading.
I've started relying pretty heavily on TermDex for my day-to-day work, tracking ToDos and notes as I debug and work on different projects: having a quick way to look through my notes, figure out my priorities for the day in a way that I can customize by quickly editing a bash script has been working out pretty well.
At this point of time, I'm basically relying on the sqlite extension to do the heavy lifting of querying data in ways that I care about, with a single ~400 line bash script doing everything else: I even added a quick pomodoro extension that shows me past pomodoros, asks for the context & collection for this one, and then ticks down the time; relying on notify-send to create alerts. I still need to find an alternative to use in WSL for this.
While I still have work to do to make the extension parse markdown, I'm also thinking about better ways of organizing collections against time: in practice, and even in some productivity classes I've taken, there's a strong need to abstract out work over time and complexity: allocate large projects to large areas of time (such as 6 months) and then break both down into something more manageable.
I plan to also start generating a large part of this newsletter automatically too: my weekly bookmarks, books, and any other things I'm reading and ready to share; tentatively I may do a Meta-only version of this blog as well to write about all the things I can't discuss here.
I tried out Zed on my Linux laptop this week and was delighted by the speed: to the point I tried out putting Termdex inside zed, and then calling back to the editor whenever I wanted to touch a file. Unfortunately it doesn't work on WSL yet, and the keyboard bindings to navigate windows were uncomfortable after being so used to Tmux and Emacs, so I've gone back to my standard setups.
I'm happy to see a serious contender for Vim, Emacs for the first time: keybindings worked smoothly, the editor was extremely snappy, LSP and newer paradigms just work -- I hope this continues.
Using a work journal: this showed up on HN, and there were several interesting comments on different work journals people were using. All the hackers were building their own versions and there were some impressive ones out there. I particularly liked journals that "stacked" contexts, allowing users to go in and out.
Designing for expert users: a podcast where a UX designer explores what it takes to help experts used to navigating CLIs quickly. Yaron Minsky also called out something I find confusing: the lack of composability of UIs (I wish we had more than copy/paste as a paradigm of sharing across UIs).
— Kunal