It was the pandemic days. Time when people were locked up in houses and had plenty of free time in their hands. That’s when I came across a hackernews article promoting the book: Building Your Mouseless Development Environment.
It sounded like a cool concept. Something to keep myself busy with until we were allowed outside again. I was hooked the moment I saw the table of contents: arch linux + zsh + i3wm + tmux + neovim. It sounded really fancy!
But I didn’t have any device where I could install arch though. I only had work laptop and I can’t install arch on that. But that didn’t stop me! I took this opportunity to build myself a PC from scratch!
It was fun! I built myself a PC from scratch (bought everything piece by piece from amazon and assembled it myself by following instructions from youtube). Then I installed arch on it and configured a mouseless development environment on it.
What did I learn?
I learned a lot of things from that project, a lot of which I have now forgotten. I won’t be able to build a PC from scratch again. Same for installing Arch Linux. The PC that I built and installed Arch on is collecting dust in my attic.
But I did pick up some new tricks from the book that I now use everyday at my work device:
- I have learned how to organize all my configs into a neat structure called dotfiles. I use them to keep all my configs synced between work laptop and personal laptop.
- Learned about i3wm, tmux and zsh in more depth.
- Started dabbling into unix-ricing.
- Most notably, I finally got the hang of (neo)vim!
If you use a shell in your day to day development, then I highly reccomend giving this book a read.