How I got started with “The Mouseless Development Environment”

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.