Minimalism
Have you noticed that the world is becoming much more colorful, motley, brighter and more contrasting?
The whole world seems to have gone crazy in pursuit of brightness, colors, texture, contrast, design and style. Over the past couple of decades, many things have appeared that would not exist without color, bright accents and design. I think there is no need to go far and the Internet without color would remain a space for geeks and nerds. That time was more for scientists, technicians and simply enthusiasts who tried to create a virtual world.
Now the paradigm has shifted towards scrolling bright pictures, photographs and videos, and the bright presentation has come to the fore, not the quality inside.
In the IT world, such a shift is also taking place; development programs (IDEs) look more like a Christmas tree with a garland or some kind of children's quests from the 2000s. The strange thing is that the programmer’s focus shifts from knowledge to anything but writing high-quality code, studying algorithms, or figuring out how Garbage Collector (.Net meme) works. Some strange super features of the future are becoming popular, the choice of beautiful error highlighting, smart assistants, etc. But the strangest thing is that everyone is starting to call themselves experts in all these values.
Minimalism.
I'm glad to see that there are examples of minimalism in programming and happy to join them. I accidentally came across enthusiasts who do things on the command line that I couldn’t do in Visual Studio or WebShtorm. We are, of course, talking about NeoVim, Tmux and similar “things” that were written and existed a long time ago – it’s as if they were discovered in a new way to the world. Why did I get to this only now is certainly an interesting question, but oh well.
Back when I was studying at the university, we had one classmate who wrote code in a notebook and it was always assembled the first time after typing it into a PC, but he didn’t have any specialized IDEs on his laptop either, just Notepad++. I saw some kind of extreme genius in this.
Now remembering that incident, I understand that it was truly a “samurai”. Thinking about the process of writing code in a “notepad”, I saw advantages in this.
You stop relying on assistants and begin to truly delve into the material you are studying;
the focus of attention does not shift to some next window of the trial period or a randomly opened window that you have never seen (thanks to hotkeys);
and in order to set up this very “notepad” you need to read and study a ton of waste paper, which also contributes to the development of critical thinking.
Minimalist.
I saw in minimalism a strength aimed not at a beautiful shell, marketing or anything else unnecessary, but at a functional core. This is how I became a minimalist in my profession.
At first I tried to set up the whole thing (Tmux, NeoVim, etc.), and began to somehow use this bundle. Then I wrote small C# or typescript projects, then I started using them in work projects, then I reconfigured them again and started all over again. It took a lot of time, but it felt great to learn something new.
It's like running in the morning. You run and realize that other people are simply going to work with a dissatisfied face, and you run to meet them and feel that you are living a little better, a little better quality of life, you feel that you are at least one step, but still closer to your goals than these people are nearby.
As a result, I became a big fan of these tools.
https://github.com/paulbuzakov/tmuxconfig
I've posted my working configuration that I use on a MacBook Pro, a home Ubuntu Server, and a cloud server.
The readme.md describes my built-in keyboard shortcuts that I use in my work. Of course, I use the standard ones too, but you can view them, as usual, at Ctrl + b + ?.
Conclusion.
The topic of minimalism in professional circles is a very strange, confusing and very amateurish topic. But it’s such a thrill when you just open a text editor, which has nothing in it, customize it for yourself from scratch and you don’t need additional crutches, you just write code and get a thrill from your knowledge and the business you’re doing.
I just wanted to share my opinion on this topic. You can study the configuration in https://github.com/paulbuzakov/tmuxconfigif you like it, you can put a star on the turnip or create a pull request with an addition.
